Coconut shy in a dream: what does it mean?
A stall where balls are thrown at coconuts on posts, which is a game of skill that has always been suspected of not being one.
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 suspicion. Everybody half believes it is fixed and plays anyway, and he would ask what the dreamer participates in without trusting.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the prize. The coconut is worth very little and is carried around all afternoon, so what is won matters less than the winning of it.
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 and competition appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such activity among ordinary reported dream content.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Shy in this sense is an old word meaning a throw, unrelated to being timid, so the name is simply a coconut throw.
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?
Everybody thinks it is rigged and everybody has a go. The coconut is worth nothing and gets carried round the whole field.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A game played without believing in it.
What are the genre conventions?
Three wooden balls in a hand, and a coconut that does not move.
How to subvert it
Write the coconut shy nobody suspects.
Try this
Two hundred words about doing something you do not trust.
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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