Whatnot in a dream: what does it mean?
A stand of open shelves for objects with no other place, named after the fact that nobody could say what would go 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 naming. A piece of furniture was sold on the promise of holding the unclassifiable, and he would ask what the dreamer owns that fits no category.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the honesty of it. Most furniture is named for its contents and this one is named for the absence of a rule about them.
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?
Objects and their arrangement appear in dream reports, and content analysis records ordinary household contents as common dream scenery.
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?
It is one of the few pieces of furniture whose name is a shrug, and it entered catalogues as that word rather than acquiring it later.
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?
Everything on it arrived for a different reason, and the shelf is the only thing they have in common.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A place for the things that fit nowhere.
What are the genre conventions?
Four tiers of small shelves, and nothing on them that matches anything else.
How to subvert it
Write the whatnot with a system.
Try this
Two hundred words about the shelf where the uncategorised goes.
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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