Hole in a dream: what does it mean?
An absence with edges, which is the only kind of nothing a person can fall into.
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 a hole appearing where the ground had been, since the frightening element is the change rather than the depth and dreamers usually report the surprise first.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the hole as the standing image of what a person is avoiding looking into, and would notice whether the dreamer went to the edge.
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?
Falling is among the most commonly reported dreams in every population studied, and the sensation at sleep onset is a well-documented physiological event. A hole in a dream is very often just the architecture the mind supplied for that.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., The typical dreams of Canadian university students (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
A hole is defined entirely by what is around it, which is why filling one destroys it and digging one creates something out of removal. It is one of the few things that exists only as an absence with a boundary. Which is why you can make one bigger and cannot make one heavier.
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?
A hole cannot be moved, only filled and re-dug elsewhere, which is a genuinely strange property for something people talk about as an object.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The absence with edges. Impossible to move and easy to make.
What are the genre conventions?
Opening in the ground, at a dramatic moment.
How to subvert it
Write somebody filling one in, badly, and it settling over a year.
Try this
Two hundred words about something that exists only because of what surrounds it. Filling it destroys it entirely.
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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