Bodhran in a dream: what does it mean?
A frame drum played with a double-ended stick and damped by the other hand from behind, so the sound is shaped by the hand nobody watches.
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 hidden hand. The visible hand keeps time and the concealed one determines the note, and he would ask which of the dreamer's two activities was actually doing the work.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the drum has no pitch of its own and takes it entirely from pressure applied out of sight. What the audience hears is produced by what they cannot see.
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?
Music occurs in a small proportion of collected dream reports, and continuity research finds it strongly associated with waking musical activity. Rhythmic and percussive dreams are often reported by players.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
It was a winnowing tray and a farm implement before it was a concert instrument, and its promotion to the standard session line-up happened largely within the twentieth century.
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?
It was a farm tray for separating grain. Somebody put a skin on it and it joined the band.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The sound made by the hand nobody is watching.
What are the genre conventions?
A goatskin, a tipper, and a room finding the beat.
How to subvert it
Write the back hand doing nothing at all.
Try this
Two hundred words about the person whose contribution is invisible and determines everything.
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.
-
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.
-
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.