Borrowing in a dream: what does it mean?
Borrowing something in a dream is usually reported with the return still pending, and the object is often smaller than the discomfort attached to 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 obligation rather than the object, since the dream has arranged for the dreamer to be quietly in someone's power over something trivial.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
For Jung the reading would ask whose quality the dreamer has taken on temporarily, since a borrowed thing is used and not owned, and the dream may be describing a way of behaving rather than a transaction.
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?
Under the continuity view this tracks real social debt closely, and small unsettled obligations are the sort of low grade unfinished business that dream research has repeatedly found overrepresented compared with matters already resolved.
Our summary of continuity research on waking activity and dream content. See Schredl and Hofmann, Consciousness and Cognition 12(2), 2003, 298-308.What do myth and folklore say?
Customary law around lending is extraordinarily detailed in most traditions, with specific rules for tools, seed, fire and salt, which suggests the trouble it causes is very old.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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?
A borrowed object is a plot device that requires no villain, because the tension is manufactured entirely by politeness. Whole social novels run on nothing else. The unreturned book is the standard instance, and it is standard because everyone has one on a shelf they no longer look at directly.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It creates an asymmetry between two people who both have to pretend it does not exist.
What are the genre conventions?
Comic fiction escalates the object. Literary fiction leaves it exactly where it is and lets the friendship bend around it.
How to subvert it
Write the lender as the one who suffers most, and never let them ask for it back.
Try this
Write three hundred words of a conversation in which the object is present and unmentioned.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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