Asterisk in a dream: what does it mean?
A small star that points at something not on the line, which makes it the only mark whose job is to say that this is not the whole story.
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 deferral. The important part has been moved to the bottom of the page, and he would ask what the dreamer has agreed to say only in small print.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note its second use. It also stands in for letters left out of a word, so the same mark covers a qualification and an omission.
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?
Incomplete information appears in dream reports, and the neurocognitive account treats such gaps as an ordinary feature of dreaming.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Asteriskos is a little star in Greek, and it was used by ancient editors to mark lines they thought had been wrongly added or moved.
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 says the sentence you have just read is not the whole thing, and it says so without interrupting the sentence.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A mark meaning there is more, elsewhere.
What are the genre conventions?
A raised star, and six lines of smaller type at the foot of the page.
How to subvert it
Write the asterisk with no footnote.
Try this
Two hundred words about a qualification moved to the bottom of the page.
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.