Aluminium in a dream: what does it mean?
A metal that was once worth more than gold, and is now what a drink can is made of, because somebody worked out how to extract it.
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 collapse in value. A substance whose worth fell by orders of magnitude without changing at all shows that price was never a property of it, and he would ask what the dreamer valued for reasons outside the thing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that abundance was never the issue. It is one of the commonest elements in the crust and was precious purely because nobody could get it out.
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?
Materials and objects appear in dream reports according to real handling, and continuity research finds everyday items occurring in proportion to daily contact.
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?
Napoleon is said to have kept aluminium cutlery for his most honoured guests and gold for the others, and the cap of the Washington Monument was cast in it as a luxury.
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?
It was the metal you gave your most important guests and gold was the second best. Now it is a drink can.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Worth everything and then nothing, unchanged throughout.
What are the genre conventions?
A light grey metal, a crushed can, and a monument capped with it.
How to subvert it
Write it still precious.
Try this
Two hundred words about something whose entire value came from a difficulty that somebody solved.
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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