Feldspar in a dream: what does it mean?
The most abundant mineral group in the earth's crust, which almost nobody outside geology can name.
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 anonymity. The commonest thing underfoot being the one nobody can name shows that familiarity and recognition are unrelated, and he would ask what surrounded the dreamer unnamed.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is most of granite. The stone everybody recognises is largely made of the mineral nobody does, so the famous thing is built from the anonymous one.
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 landscape appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds ordinary surroundings occurring far more than remarkable ones.
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?
Its breakdown produces most of the world's clay, so the pottery of every culture is made from a mineral almost none of those cultures had a name for.
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?
Nearly all the world's clay is this mineral falling apart. Every pot ever thrown is made of something nobody can name.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The commonest thing there is and nobody knows its name.
What are the genre conventions?
Pale blocky crystals in granite, and a hand that cannot say what they are.
How to subvert it
Write it famous.
Try this
Two hundred words about the most ordinary material there is being the one nobody has ever heard of.
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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