Cobalt in a dream: what does it mean?
A metal named after the goblin that miners blamed, because its ore looked like silver and poisoned the people smelting 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 blame. A substance named after a spirit accused of substituting worthless ore records an accusation rather than a fact, and he would ask whom the dreamer blamed for a disappointment.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the miners were right about the harm. The ore carried arsenic and the fumes made people ill, so the goblin was a correct observation with the wrong cause attached.
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?
Materials appear in dream reports according to real handling, and continuity research finds occupational materials occurring most in the dreams of people who work with them.
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?
Kobold was the mine spirit blamed for ore that looked like silver and yielded nothing, and the blue glass and glaze the metal produces was prized long before anybody isolated it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
The miners were right that it was hurting them. They had the effect exactly and blamed a goblin for it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A name that records who got the blame.
What are the genre conventions?
Ore that looks like silver, a furnace, and men getting ill.
How to subvert it
Write the goblin's account.
Try this
Two hundred words about people noticing something real and explaining it with the only thing available.
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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