Checkers in a dream: what does it mean?
A game with one kind of piece and one move, which is why it is taught to children and why it has been solved by computers.
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 promotion. A piece that reaches the far side and comes back with new powers is a shape he would want to talk about, and he would ask who taught the dreamer to play.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a game where every piece is identical until one crosses the board as a small image of individuation, and would notice whether the dreamer's king was ever made.
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?
Games in dreams tend to reproduce the social setting rather than the rules, and this one usually brings a specific opponent with it, often a grandparent or a sibling. The board is rarely the point.
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 game was weakly solved by a research team at the University of Alberta in 2007, meaning perfect play by both sides is proven to end in a draw. It is one of the largest games ever solved and it took eighteen years of computation.
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?
Useful precisely because it is simple. Two characters can play it while talking about something else, which chess never quite allows.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The identical piece that crosses over and comes back changed.
What are the genre conventions?
Played on a porch by old men, as shorthand for time passing.
How to subvert it
Let somebody take it seriously, because the good players do.
Try this
Two hundred words of a game played every evening for a year.
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.