Bradawl in a dream: what does it mean?
A small tool that starts a hole by pushing wood fibres aside rather than cutting them, so nothing is removed.
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 nothing being taken out. A hole made by displacement leaves all the material present and rearranged, and he would ask what the dreamer had made room for without losing anything.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the fibres close back. The wood grips a screw harder because the displaced fibres press in on it, so the disturbance is what makes the fixing hold.
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?
Skilled manual work appears in the dreams of those who do it, and continuity research finds craft activity among the most reliably reproduced waking 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 turned across the grain first so it severs a few fibres rather than splitting along them, which is the difference between a starter hole and a crack.
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?
Turn it the wrong way and you get a split instead of a hole. The tool is the same and the technique is everything.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Room made without anything being lost.
What are the genre conventions?
A small point pressed and twisted, and a hole with no shavings.
How to subvert it
Write it drilling.
Try this
Two hundred words about making space for something without removing anything at all.
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.