Backgammon in a dream: what does it mean?
One of the oldest games still played, and the only common board game where luck and skill are both large and both visible.
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 dice, since a player can be beaten by chance after playing perfectly and must decide what to make of that.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a game combining chance and judgement in visible proportions as a fair model of most decisions, and would ask whether the dreamer blamed the dice.
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 weaker player wins a single game surprisingly often and a match almost never, which is why serious play is scored over many games. The luck is real and it averages out.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Boards essentially identical to the modern one were excavated at Ur and date back roughly five thousand years, and the Roman tabula was close enough that a modern player could sit down at it. Very few human activities have survived that unchanged. The doubling cube is the only modern addition and it is barely a century old. It arrived in New York in the 1920s and changed the whole game.
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?
A game a Roman and a modern player could both sit down to without instruction is a genuinely startling continuity.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The contest where luck is admitted. And blamed, correctly, half the time.
What are the genre conventions?
Played in a cafe by two old men who have played for decades.
How to subvert it
Write the doubling cube, and the moment somebody offers it. Accepting doubles the stake and admits you might win.
Try this
Two hundred words about losing after playing perfectly. The dice are not sorry.
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.