Colander in a dream: what does it mean?
A bowl full of holes, which is useless for everything a bowl is for and perfect for the one thing it does.
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 deliberate flaw. A container ruined on purpose so that it will not hold is a vessel defined by its failure, and he would ask what the dreamer had broken in order to use.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it keeps the solid and loses the liquid. The choice of what to keep was made by whoever drilled the holes, and the user has no say once it is made.
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?
Domestic objects appear in dream reports according to real use, and continuity research finds household items occurring in proportion to daily handling.
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?
Colare is to strain, and the same root gives percolate and the modern coffee percolator, so a saucepan lid full of holes and a coffee pot are named from the same action.
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?
A colander and a percolator are named from the same word for straining. One drains and one drips and both are doing it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A container spoiled on purpose so it can work.
What are the genre conventions?
Steam going up, water going out, and everything worth keeping staying.
How to subvert it
Write it without holes.
Try this
Two hundred words about something made useless for its obvious purpose so it can do one other thing.
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.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.