Emoji in a dream: what does it mean?
A small picture doing the job of a face, added because writing lost the tone of voice and never found a way to get it back.
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 what it is covering. A face is attached to make sure a sentence is not read badly, and he would ask which sentences the dreamer did not trust on their own.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that meanings drift by age. The same small picture is warm to one generation and sarcastic to another, so a device for removing ambiguity has quietly become a source 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?
Faces are among the most commonly reported dream content, and content analysis records people as present in the large majority of ordinary dream reports.
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?
Punctuation was the previous attempt at the same job, and the exclamation mark has been accused of being shrill for as long as it has existed.
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 exists because writing lost tone of voice, and it now needs its own explanation from one generation to the next.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A face stuck on a sentence to stop it being read wrongly.
What are the genre conventions?
A single yellow circle at the end of a line.
How to subvert it
Write the message that needs none.
Try this
Two hundred words about a picture doing the work punctuation could not.
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.