Blotter in a dream: what does it mean?
Soft paper pressed onto wet ink, which dries the page and takes away a mirror image of everything that was on it.
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 copy nobody intended. A tool for tidying keeps a reversed record of every private thing pressed against it, and he would ask what the dreamer had left behind while cleaning up.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is unreadable and complete. Everything is there, backwards and layered over itself, which is a fair description of most attempts to remember a week.
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?
Dream reports are commonly fragmentary and reversed in sequence, and the neurocognitive account treats recall of a dream as a reconstruction rather than a playback.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
A held-up mirror turns a blotter into a reading, which is why the careful used a fresh sheet and the incautious kept one for years.
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?
Hold it to a mirror and it gives you back everything, in the wrong order and on top of itself.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A record kept accidentally by the act of tidying.
What are the genre conventions?
A leather corner, a pink sheet, and hundreds of overlapping words.
How to subvert it
Write the blotter as the only honest document in the house.
Try this
Two hundred words about the copy nobody meant to keep.
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.