Barre in a dream: what does it mean?
A rail held for the first half of a ballet class, doing the work that will later have to be done without 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 plan to let go. The support exists in order to become unnecessary, and he would ask what the dreamer is holding that is meant to be released.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the sameness of it. The sequence at the start of a class is more or less the same everywhere, so a dancer can walk into any studio in the world and know the first half hour.
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?
Practice and repetition appear in dream reports, and the continuity view treats waking training 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?
It is one of very few pieces of equipment whose correct use involves touching it as lightly as possible, since leaning on it defeats the exercise.
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?
You are meant to barely touch it. Holding on properly is doing it wrong, which is a strange instruction to give somebody about a handrail.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A support that must not be leaned on.
What are the genre conventions?
A wooden rail, a hand resting rather than gripping, and a mirror opposite.
How to subvert it
Write the barre somebody holds tightly.
Try this
Two hundred words about a support you are meant to stop needing.
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.