Peridot in a dream: what does it mean?
A green gem that comes in only one colour, and which arrives on earth in meteorites as well as out of volcanoes.
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 single colour. A stone with no variation offers no choosing at all, and he would ask what the dreamer took without any option about which one.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that some of it did not form here. The same mineral in a ring and in a meteorite is the identical substance, one of which crossed the solar system to arrive.
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?
Colour is often reported inconsistently in dream accounts, and content analysis finds it noted mainly when emphatic or unusual rather than as routine detail.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
It makes up a great deal of the earth's mantle, so the gem is a piece of the layer under everything, brought up by volcanoes or delivered from space.
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?
Some of it fell out of the sky and some came up from the mantle, and the two are indistinguishable in a setting.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The stone with no choice of colour.
What are the genre conventions?
One shade of green, and a ring that might have come from space.
How to subvert it
Write the meteorite one identified.
Try this
Two hundred words about two identical things, one of which travelled unimaginably further to get here.
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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