Photocopier in a dream: what does it mean?
A machine that produces something identical and slightly worse, which is the whole of what it does and a fair description of what copying costs.
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 copy of a copy, since each generation loses a little and the degradation is visible, which makes it an unusually literal object.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take endless reproduction of the same page as an image of a life that has stopped generating anything, and would ask what the dreamer was copying.
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?
Office dreams cluster around machines that jam, refuse and run out at the wrong moment, and the photocopier is the standard example because it fails in front of people who are waiting. The humiliation is social rather than technical.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Xerography was rejected by more than twenty companies before anybody backed it, on the reasoning that carbon paper already existed and was cheaper. The machine that defined office life was turned down as a solution to a problem nobody agreed they had. Chester Carlson spent more than a decade being refused before Haloid took it on.
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 queue behind somebody at a jammed copier is a complete social situation, with a hierarchy, a time limit and no possible dignity.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The identical thing that is slightly worse.
What are the genre conventions?
Jamming, in a comedy about an office.
How to subvert it
Write the inventor being turned down for the twentieth time.
Try this
Two hundred words about failing at something simple in front of people. The queue is four deep and patient.
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.