Banjo in a dream: what does it mean?
An instrument that carries more history than sound, since it came to America from West Africa and was then taken up by the people who had enslaved its makers.
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 probably attend to a dreamer who plays badly in the dream, since public performance that goes wrong is one of his more familiar shapes and does not require the instrument to mean anything in particular.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might be interested in an instrument that carries a whole inherited history whether or not the player knows it, and would ask what the dreamer has taken up without choosing.
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?
Musicians dream about playing, and the dreams tend to involve the practical business of it: tuning that will not hold, a string that breaks, an audience arriving early. Dream content follows the waking activity closely here.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
The instrument descends from West African lutes carried to the Americas by enslaved people, and was played by Black musicians long before minstrel shows made it a stock prop and attached a caricature to it that took most of a century to shake off. The current association with white Appalachian music is the newest layer, not the oldest.
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?
Almost impossible to put in a scene without invoking one film. That is a reason to name the tune, the player and the room, and to be specific enough to displace it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The instrument whose history the player may not have been told.
What are the genre conventions?
Porches, and a single overused scene from a 1972 film.
How to subvert it
Put it in a city, in a conservatoire, in the hands of somebody with a doctorate in its history.
Try this
Two hundred words in which somebody is taught where the instrument came from.
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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