Straining in a dream: what does it mean?
Effort against something that does not move, where all the work goes in and nothing at all comes out.
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 absence of a result. Maximum effort with no motion is the purest picture of frustration there is, and he would ask what the dreamer had been pushing at.
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 invisible from outside. Somebody straining and somebody standing still look almost the same, which is true of a great deal of the hardest work anybody does.
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?
Effortful action that produces no result is commonly reported in dreams, and the typical-dreams literature records trying and failing to move or act among the recurring situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Sisyphus at least gets the stone up the hill before it goes back down, which makes his punishment more generous than this one.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
From two feet away it looks like standing still. That is true of most of the hardest work anybody does.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Full effort, no motion, nothing to show.
What are the genre conventions?
A rope taut, and nothing on either end moving.
How to subvert it
Write the strain that shifts it.
Try this
Two hundred words about work that leaves no evidence.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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