Tacks in a dream: what does it mean?
Short nails with broad heads, sold by the hundred, and the reason nobody walks barefoot in a room where carpet is being laid.
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 something small and sharp scattered where people walk, since the anticipation of standing on one does more work than the event.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a fastening designed to be driven in and left as the material, and would notice whether the dreamer was hammering or treading.
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?
Old tacks left in floorboards are one of the commonest hazards of taking up a carpet, and anybody who has done it remembers finding them with a hand. The dream version is usually that memory rather than an invention.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Getting down to brass tacks is usually explained as the tacks set into a draper's counter to measure cloth, so that coming to them meant getting to the actual measuring and the actual price. The explanation is contested but it is the most plausible one offered. Rival theories involve upholstery and shipbuilding and neither accounts for the brass.
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?
Brass tacks in a counter is the sort of detail that makes a shop scene feel researched, and it costs one clause.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The small sharp thing left where people walk. Invisible until it is not.
What are the genre conventions?
Spilled on a floor, in a scene about clumsiness or malice.
How to subvert it
Write the draper measuring against the counter, and the customer watching the tacks.
Try this
Two hundred words about the moment a negotiation gets specific. Both of them relax slightly when it does.
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.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.