Drainpipe in a dream: what does it mean?
A vertical pipe on the outside of a house that everybody has considered climbing and almost nobody has, because they do not hold.
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 route in and out that is not a door, since a dreamer climbing a drainpipe has chosen an entrance nobody sanctioned and everybody can see.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a channel that carries away what a building cannot absorb as a workable image, and would notice whether the dream pipe was flowing or blocked.
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 sound of water in a downpipe at night is a common and specific domestic noise, and it is a plausible physical route into a dream that features rain or plumbing.
Our summary of the incorporation literature. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Cast iron downpipes were bolted to the wall and would take a person's weight; modern plastic ones will not, and come away with the brackets. The escape route in every old story stopped working when the material changed. Cast iron was also worth stealing, which is why so many were replaced.
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?
Plastic pipes not holding is worth knowing before writing an escape, and it dates a building precisely for anybody who does.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The way out that is not the door. Considered by everybody and used by almost nobody.
What are the genre conventions?
Climbed at night, in a romance or a burglary.
How to subvert it
Write it coming off the wall halfway up. Brackets, render and all.
Try this
Two hundred words about a route everybody assumes will hold. It has held for forty years.
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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