Lacewing in a dream: what does it mean?
A green insect with transparent veined wings, whose larvae eat aphids in quantity and disguise themselves with the corpses.
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 disguise. A creature that covers itself in what it has killed carries the evidence deliberately, and he would ask what the dreamer was wearing that they had taken from somebody.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the gap between the adult and the larva. Nothing about the delicate green flier suggests what it was, and the two stages could not be less alike in reputation.
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?
Insects occur in dream reports according to waking exposure, and continuity research finds garden creatures appearing most in the dreams of people who spend time gardening.
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?
Gardeners buy the larvae to release, so the insect is sold specifically for what it does to other insects. Its eggs are laid on stalks to keep them out of reach of its own siblings.
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?
Its eggs are laid on tiny stalks so the first to hatch cannot reach the others. The mother builds in protection against her own young.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Wearing what you have killed as cover.
What are the genre conventions?
Pale green wings on a window, and something bristling on a rose stem.
How to subvert it
Write the larva and the adult meeting.
Try this
Two hundred words about something admired in one form and bought as a weapon in another.
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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