Hobby horse in a dream: what does it mean?
A horse's head on a stick, and also the subject somebody cannot be stopped from returning to, which is the same object twice.
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 double meaning. The language took a child's toy and made it the word for an adult obsession, and he would ask what the dreamer rides that everybody else has heard about already.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note how little is supplied. A head and a stick, and the child provides the horse, the road and the speed, which is more than most toys ask for.
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?
Repeated preoccupations recur across a dreamer's dream series, and the continuity view treats persistent dream concerns as tracking persistent waking 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?
The hobby was a small breed of horse before it was a pastime, so a hobbyist is riding a little horse and has been for four hundred years without noticing.
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?
Somebody says he is off on his hobby horse again, and nobody in the room pictures a stick.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A toy that became the word for not letting something go.
What are the genre conventions?
A stick between the knees, and a great deal of galloping.
How to subvert it
Write the listener who wants to hear it again.
Try this
Two hundred words about a small horse that turned into a habit.
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.