Gouache in a dream: what does it mean?
Watercolour made opaque, which restores the one thing watercolour cannot do, which is cover a mistake.
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 permits. It exists so that something can be painted over, and he would ask what the dreamer wants the option of covering.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the trade. Opacity is bought at the cost of the transparency that made the medium worth using, so the fix removes the reason for the thing.
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?
Corrections and second attempts appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such ordinary activity among 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?
It is the same paint with white added or with more binder, so the difference between the two media is a matter of how much light gets through to the paper.
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?
It can cover a mistake, which watercolour cannot, and it gives up the transparency that was the point of watercolour to do it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A fix that costs the thing it fixed.
What are the genre conventions?
A flat white highlight sitting on top of a wash rather than in it.
How to subvert it
Write the gouache you can see through.
Try this
Two hundred words about a solution that removes the reason for the problem.
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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