Tuba in a dream: what does it mean?
The lowest voice in a band, which nobody consciously listens to and everybody notices the second it stops.
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 being noticed only by absence. A contribution that registers as a hole when withdrawn and as nothing when present is thankless in a specific way, and he would ask what the dreamer held up unremarked.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it supplies the floor. Everything above stands on the bass line, and an audience experiences it as the room rather than as an instrument.
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 occurs in a small proportion of dream reports, and continuity research finds it concentrated among people who play rather than distributed across dreamers generally.
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 came late to the orchestra, replacing an assortment of earlier bass instruments that were all difficult, and it is the youngest of the standard brass.
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?
Nobody listens to it and everybody hears the hole when it stops. That is the job and it never changes.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Noticed only by its absence.
What are the genre conventions?
A low note under everything, and a band that sounds wrong without it.
How to subvert it
Write it playing the tune.
Try this
Two hundred words about somebody holding the whole thing up and being noticed only when they stop.
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.