Cordon in a dream: what does it mean?
A line of tape that turns a street into a scene, and everybody on the wrong side of it into an audience.
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 crowd it creates. A barrier produces the watching it was meant to prevent, and he would ask what the dreamer stood at the edge of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note how little it is. Plastic tape stops hundreds of people who could walk through it in a second, which makes it almost entirely a symbol that works.
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?
Barriers and being kept out appear in dream reports, and content analysis records obstruction among ordinary dream events.
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?
Cordon is a cord, a small one, so the word is honest about being a piece of string doing the work of a wall.
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?
It is plastic tape and it stops several hundred people, any of whom could walk through it in a second.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A symbol doing the work of a wall.
What are the genre conventions?
Blue and white tape, ends lifting in wind.
How to subvert it
Write the cordon nobody stops at.
Try this
Two hundred words about a piece of string that holds a street.
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.
-
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.
-
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.