Barbican in a dream: what does it mean?
An outwork in front of a gate, built so that anyone attacking has to take a second gate first and be shot at from both sides while doing it.
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 doubling. A defence that exists to make the real entrance harder to reach admits the real entrance is the weakness, and he would ask what the dreamer had built a screen in front of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the space between the two gates is the trap. It is deliberately a place to be caught in, and the design is an invitation into somewhere that can be closed.
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?
Dreams of being trapped between barriers and unable to go forward or back are often reported across collections, and content analysis records enclosure among the recurring impediments in dream narratives.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The killing ground between the outer and inner gates was overlooked from above on every side, and the whole point of the arrangement was to let an attacker in as far as that and no further.
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?
The design lets the attacker in on purpose, as far as a yard with walls on every side. That was the whole idea.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The gap between two gates that is meant to be entered.
What are the genre conventions?
An outer arch, a courtyard, and openings above on all four sides.
How to subvert it
Write somebody welcomed through it.
Try this
Two hundred words about being let in as far as a place that was built to be closed behind you.
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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