Ukulele in a dream: what does it mean?
A small four-stringed instrument brought to Hawaii by Portuguese immigrants and taken up so completely that it became the island's own.
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 adoption. Something arriving with immigrants and becoming the emblem of the place that received it has changed hands entirely, and he would ask what the dreamer had taken up and made theirs.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that its reputation is for being easy. It is genuinely easy to start and not easy to play well, and the first fact keeps most people from discovering the second.
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 appears in a small minority of dream reports, and continuity research finds it concentrated among those whose waking activity involves playing.
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 descends from the Madeiran machete, and the name is generally given as jumping flea, from the movement of a player's fingers on the fretboard.
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 name is usually given as jumping flea, after what the player's hand looks like. Nobody has bettered the description.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Something borrowed so thoroughly it became the borrower's own.
What are the genre conventions?
Four strings, a small body, and a beginner already playing a song.
How to subvert it
Write somebody playing it badly for forty years.
Try this
Two hundred words about a thing that arrived with strangers and became the emblem of the place it landed.
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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