Colonnade in a dream: what does it mean?
A row of columns carrying a roof, which is a wall with most of it removed and the load put into the gaps.
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 what has been taken away. A wall reduced to the points that carry weight has had everything else deleted, and he would ask what the dreamer could remove without anything falling.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it frames rather than blocks. Walking along one, the view is delivered in sections, so the structure decides what is seen and when.
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?
Thresholds and transitional spaces recur as dream settings, and content analysis finds them appearing independently of the events that take place in them.
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?
The spacing was set by what the stone lintel could span, so the rhythm of every classical building is the length of a piece of stone somebody could quarry and lift.
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 spacing of every classical colonnade is the length of stone somebody could quarry and lift. That is the rhythm.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A wall with everything unnecessary deleted.
What are the genre conventions?
Regular shadows across a floor, and a view arriving in sections.
How to subvert it
Write the gaps filled in.
Try this
Two hundred words about a structure that is mostly the parts somebody decided to leave out.
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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