Bricklayer in a dream: what does it mean?
A trade laying identical units in a pattern where the joints must never line up, because a straight vertical line is where a wall fails.
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 staggering. A structure that holds because nothing is directly above anything else distributes weakness deliberately, and he would ask what the dreamer had arranged so no fault ran straight through.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the pattern is visible forever. A bond is chosen once and shows on the face of the building for as long as it stands, so a decision made in a morning is permanently on display.
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?
Occupational activity is among the strongest waking predictors of dream content, and continuity research finds trades reproduced in detail by the people who work in them.
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?
English bond, Flemish bond and stretcher bond can be told apart from across a street, and a wall one brick thick is a modern skin while the older bonds show the wall is solid all the way through.
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?
You can tell from across the road whether a wall is solid or a skin. The pattern says so and nobody looks.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Held together by nothing lining up.
What are the genre conventions?
A line pulled taut, a trowel, and a course going on.
How to subvert it
Write the joints aligned.
Try this
Two hundred words about strength that comes entirely from refusing to let weaknesses stack up.
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.