Apostle in a dream: what does it mean?
One of a named group chosen for a task, and a word that has left religion entirely to mean anybody who spreads a conviction.
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 group rather than the belief, since twelve men chosen by one person and named individually is a family structure as much as a religious one.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the twelve as a number the tradition returns to constantly, and would notice whether the dreamer could count them or knew which one they were.
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?
The word now most often appears secularly, describing somebody who promotes an idea with more conviction than evidence, and that usage is usually faintly critical. A dreamer may be reaching for either sense.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Each is given an identifying object in medieval art so that an illiterate congregation could tell them apart: keys for Peter, a saw for Simon, a flaying knife for Bartholomew. Apostle spoons carry the same attributes on the handles, which is why a set can be read. A single spoon from a broken set can still be identified by what the figure holds.
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 attributes are a whole visual language for anybody writing a church interior, and most of them are instruments of the death of the person holding them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The one of a numbered group.
What are the genre conventions?
A table of twelve, arranged for a painting.
How to subvert it
Write somebody in a church working out who is who from the objects.
Try this
Two hundred words about being identifiable only by what you are holding. Somebody has taken it out of their hands.
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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