Balustrade in a dream: what does it mean?
A row of small shaped posts holding a rail, named after the pomegranate flower its bulging profile was thought to resemble.
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 barrier being open. A rail you can see through prevents a fall and prevents nothing else, and he would ask what the dreamer had put up that stopped only one thing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the shape came from a flower. Somebody looked at a pomegranate blossom and turned it into a stone post, and the whole architecture is carrying a botanical resemblance nobody sees.
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?
Buildings and their details appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds architectural detail tracking the places a dreamer actually spends time in.
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?
Balaustion is the pomegranate flower, and the swelling profile of the post was named for it, so a stone rail is named after a fruit blossom.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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 posts are named after a pomegranate flower. Somebody saw the resemblance once and the whole architecture kept the word.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A barrier that stops exactly one thing.
What are the genre conventions?
A row of turned stone, a terrace, and a view straight through it.
How to subvert it
Write it solid.
Try this
Two hundred words about a boundary that prevents a fall and permits absolutely everything else.
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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