Wink in a dream: what does it mean?
Closing one eye at one person, which creates a private agreement in a public room and cannot be done at two people at once.
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 exclusion. It makes one person an insider and everybody else the audience, and he would ask who the dreamer was being let in on.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the risk in it. A wink that is seen by the wrong person turns instantly into something worse than saying the thing out loud, and there is no way to explain it afterwards.
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?
Social signalling and being included or excluded recur in dream reports, and content analysis records interactions with known people more often than with strangers.
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?
Forty winks is unrelated and much older, from a wink meaning the briefest closing of the eyes, which is why the number is small.
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?
It cannot be aimed at two people. That is the entire mechanism, and it is why being caught doing one is so bad.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A private agreement made in a public room.
What are the genre conventions?
One eye, closing and opening, across a table.
How to subvert it
Write the wink everybody sees.
Try this
Two hundred words about letting one person in on something.
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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