Sundial in a dream: what does it mean?
A clock that is right about the sun and wrong about the time, and which stops entirely when the weather turns.
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 timepiece that fails in cloud, since it makes time contingent on weather in a way no mechanical clock does and a dreamer waiting on one is waiting on the sky.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a shadow used as an instrument as worth noticing, since the thing doing the measuring is an absence of light rather than a mark.
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?
A sundial shows solar time, which differs from clock time by up to sixteen minutes across the year, and the correction is called the equation of time. It is not inaccurate; it is measuring a different thing.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
The mottoes carved on them are almost uniformly about death: I count only the sunny hours, it is later than you think, the last one kills. A garden ornament carries the most consistently morbid inscription tradition in English. Choosing a cheerful one is oddly difficult. The catalogues offer forty and thirty-eight are about death.
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?
Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat: all wound, the last one kills. Carved on a sundial in a pleasant garden, by somebody who meant it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The measure that stops when the sky closes. Correct, and useless, by four o'clock.
What are the genre conventions?
In a walled garden, catching light, in something wistful.
How to subvert it
Write the motto being chosen from a catalogue by somebody buying one.
Try this
Two hundred words about a cheerful object with a grim inscription. Chosen from a catalogue by somebody in a hurry.
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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