Aquamarine in a dream: what does it mean?
A pale blue-green stone in the same family as emerald, differing only in which trace metal happens to be present.
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 difference being a trace. Two stones separated by a small impurity and valued utterly differently make the distinction arbitrary and absolute at once, and he would ask what tiny thing set the dreamer's categories.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the colour is the same water everybody says it is. The name simply states the resemblance and nobody has improved on it.
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?
Colour is described inconsistently in dream reports, and content analysis finds it noted mainly when unusual or emphatic rather than as routine scene detail.
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?
Sailors carried it as protection at sea on the strength of the colour, and the same mineral is emerald when chromium is present instead of iron.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
Emerald and aquamarine are the same mineral. One has chromium in it and one has iron, and that is the entire difference.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Separated from something precious by a trace of a different metal.
What are the genre conventions?
A pale clear blue, a ship's cabin, and a stone carried for luck.
How to subvert it
Write the two stones from one seam.
Try this
Two hundred words about two things treated as utterly different that differ by almost nothing.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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