Tambourine in a dream: what does it mean?
The instrument given to whoever cannot play anything else, which is unfair, because playing one properly is difficult.
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 being handed one, since it is the instrument of inclusion without competence and everybody in the room understands that.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take an instrument that makes a sound whatever you do to it as an image of participation that cannot fail and cannot excel either.
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?
Percussion is genuinely hard to play quietly, and the tambourine's reputation comes from being impossible to hide in rather than from being simple. A player who can produce a roll on one has a real technique.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
The timbrel is one of the oldest instruments named in the Hebrew Bible and is played by Miriam after the crossing of the sea, with the women following her. It has been an instrument of women's public celebration for a very long time. Miriam is called a prophet in the same verse, which is the only place she is given the title.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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 joke about the tambourine player is available and worn. Giving one to somebody who can actually play it is fresher and funnier.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The participation that cannot fail or excel. Everybody in the room understands the arrangement.
What are the genre conventions?
Shaken enthusiastically by the least musical person present.
How to subvert it
Write somebody good at it, and the room realising. They have been holding it all evening.
Try this
Two hundred words about being included in something you cannot do. They are grateful and know exactly what has happened.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
-
Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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.