Bureau in a dream: what does it mean?
A desk with a sloping front that closes, so the work in progress can be shut away without being tidied.
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 closing. Papers are hidden mid-sentence rather than finished, and he would ask what the dreamer has shut the lid on rather than completed.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the pigeonholes. A grid of small compartments is a claim that everything has a category, which is a hopeful thing to build into furniture.
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?
Writing and unfinished work appear in dream reports, and the continuity view treats waking occupations as tracking into dream content.
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?
Bureau first meant the coarse cloth that covered a writing table, then the table, then the room, then the whole department, so a government office is named after a piece of fabric.
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?
You do not tidy it, you close it. The letter stays half written behind the flap and is still half written next week.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Work put away without being finished.
What are the genre conventions?
A sloping front, a small brass key, and pigeonholes with somebody else's system in them.
How to subvert it
Write the bureau that will not close.
Try this
Two hundred words about shutting the lid on an unfinished letter.
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.