Basketball in a dream: what does it mean?
A game invented on purpose, in a fortnight, to solve a specific problem, which almost no other sport can say.
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 picked or not picked, since for a great many people the lasting memory of the game is a line of children and a choosing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a game requiring constant handover as an image of trust exercised at speed, and would notice whether the dreamer got the ball back.
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?
Sporting dreams reliably reproduce degraded skill: shots that will not reach, legs that will not move, a ball that will not bounce. Athletes report this as much as anybody, which is worth knowing before reading it as a comment on ability.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
James Naismith invented it in 1891 to keep a class occupied indoors through a New England winter, nailed a peach basket to a gallery rail, and had to fetch a ladder every time somebody scored. The bottom was cut out of the basket some years later. Naismith wrote thirteen rules and most of them are still recognisable in the modern game.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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 ladder is the detail. For several years the game stopped completely after every single point while somebody climbed up to get the ball.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The game designed rather than grown.
What are the genre conventions?
A last-second shot, arcing, in slow motion.
How to subvert it
Write the first game, and the man with the ladder.
Try this
Two hundred words about an invention that worked immediately and badly. The inventor is delighted and everybody else is waiting.
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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