Charades in a dream: what does it mean?
A word acted without speech, where the difficulty is not the word but the ban on the one thing that would settle 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 prohibition. A game built on not being allowed to say the thing makes the withheld word the loudest object in the room, and he would ask what the dreamer could not name.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the signs. The gestures for book, film and sounds like are known by everybody and taught by nobody, a small private sign language passed along at parties.
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?
Being unable to speak or make yourself understood is among the recurring themes recorded in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature lists it alongside falling and being chased.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
The older parlour form was a riddle in verse where each syllable was clued in turn, and the acting version kept the name after dropping the poem.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
Everyone in the room knows the sign for sounds like and nobody remembers being taught it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The one word that would end it, and the rule against saying it.
What are the genre conventions?
A person waving both arms while the room shouts wrong answers.
How to subvert it
Write the guesser who is right immediately and disbelieved.
Try this
Two hundred words about a language nobody was taught and everybody knows.
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.