Blunderbuss in a dream: what does it mean?
A gun with a flared muzzle, which does not spread the shot, whatever everybody believes, and is flared to make loading quick.
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 belief outlasting the fact. A design feature universally explained by something it does not do has been read by everybody the same wrong way, and he would ask what the dreamer had confidently accounted for.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the shape looks like what people expect. A widening barrel is such an obvious picture of a spreading shot that the explanation arrived without anybody testing it.
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?
Weapons and threat appear in dream reports, and content analysis records aggression in a substantial proportion of dream narratives across samples.
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?
The flare makes it faster to pour powder and shot into on a moving coach or a rolling deck, and the spread is determined by the bore and the load rather than by the shape of the last few inches.
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?
The flare is for loading quickly on a moving coach. It does not spread the shot, and almost everybody believes it does.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A feature explained by something it does not do.
What are the genre conventions?
A widening mouth, and a guard loading it on a coach at speed.
How to subvert it
Write it explained correctly.
Try this
Two hundred words about a thing everybody accounts for the same way and everybody has wrong.
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.