Clavichord in a dream: what does it mean?
The quietest keyboard there is, and the only early one where pressing harder makes the note louder and lets it be bent.
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 intimacy being enforced. An instrument too quiet for a room of people can only be played for one or two, and he would ask what the dreamer could only say to somebody close.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the string is still touched while it sounds. The tangent stays in contact, so the player is connected to the note for its whole life and can move 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?
Music is often reported in a small minority of dreams, and continuity research finds dreamed music concentrated among those whose waking activity involves it.
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 the instrument players practised on and kept at home, and Bach's household had one, so the music everybody knows from a concert hall was largely worked out on something barely audible.
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?
A great deal of the music now played in halls was worked out on something you could not hear from the next room.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Too quiet to be played for more than two people.
What are the genre conventions?
A small box on a table, a candle, and a note that can be pushed sharp.
How to subvert it
Write it in a concert hall.
Try this
Two hundred words about work done privately on something nobody else could hear.
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.