Gimlet in a dream: what does it mean?
A small hand borer with a screw tip that pulls itself into the wood, and a word that also describes a look.
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 word travelling to a stare. A tool that bores steadily giving its name to a look that goes through somebody says something about how that look feels, and he would ask who looked at the dreamer that way.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it does the work by turning rather than pressing. Force achieves nothing and rotation achieves everything, which is a distinction most people learn by getting it wrong first.
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?
Objects and tools appear in dream reports according to handling, and continuity research finds them occurring most for people who use 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?
The screw tip draws it in so that pressure is unnecessary, and the same principle scales all the way up to the auger and the drill bit.
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?
Pushing it does nothing. It goes in by being turned, and everybody discovers that by pushing first.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A word that left the workshop and became a stare.
What are the genre conventions?
A wooden handle across the palm, and a hole appearing without any force.
How to subvert it
Write the look rather than the tool.
Try this
Two hundred words about a name that moved from a thing to the way somebody looks at you.
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.