Rhinestone in a dream: what does it mean?
Cut glass sold as a jewel, named after a river where the original stones were gathered, and honest about itself in a way most imitations are not.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the anxiety about being found out, since a dream about costume jewellery is very rarely about the jewellery and very often about whether somebody in the room can tell.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take an object that performs a value it does not have as a workable image of a presentation a person maintains, and would ask whether the dreamer knew and whether anybody else did.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Inherited costume jewellery is common in dreams and frequently carries more feeling than the real thing would, because it belonged to somebody rather than being worth something. The distinction between value and meaning tends to be the whole of the dream.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The originals were quartz pebbles collected from the Rhine, cut and backed with foil to throw light. Georg Strass improved the effect with a lead glass in the eighteenth century, which is why the stones are called strass in much of Europe and rhinestones in English, two names for one object depending on whether you credit the river or the man.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
The two names are the material. Whether a character says rhinestone or strass places them by country and by trade in a single word.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The thing that performs a worth it does not have.
What are the genre conventions?
Glittering under a spotlight, on somebody the story means us to pity.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who prefers them, buys them openly, and is not pretending anything.
Try this
Two hundred words about wearing something everybody can tell is not real.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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