Drystone wall in a dream: what does it mean?
A wall built without mortar, which stands because the stones are placed to lock, and lets wind straight through on purpose.
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 nothing holding it. A structure with no binding at all, standing for centuries on placement alone, is held by arrangement rather than by adhesion, and he would ask what the dreamer kept up without any fixing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the gaps are wanted. Wind passes through rather than pushing it over, and stock shelter in the lee, so the porousness is the design and not a shortcoming.
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?
Landscape features appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds local terrain occurring far more than unfamiliar terrain.
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?
A waller places each stone once and does not adjust it, and the through-stones running the full width every so often are what tie the two faces into one wall rather than two.
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?
A solid wall would blow down. The gaps let the wind through, and the sheep shelter in the lee of the thing that is not stopping it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Held up by arrangement and by nothing else.
What are the genre conventions?
Two faces, a filled middle, and long stones tying them together.
How to subvert it
Write it mortared.
Try this
Two hundred words about something standing for centuries with nothing at all holding it together.
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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