Ingot in a dream: what does it mean?
Metal cast into a bar for storage rather than use, shaped only so that it can be stacked, weighed and moved.
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 shape being for handling. An object formed with no purpose except being carried and counted is entirely potential, and he would ask what the dreamer held in a form ready for anything.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is an intermediate state. Nothing is an ingot for its own sake, so the object exists between the ore and whatever it will become.
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 materials appear in dream reports according to real handling, and continuity research finds them occurring most for people whose work involves 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 word comes from a term for a mould, so the bar is named after the hollow it was poured into rather than after the metal in it.
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 named after the mould rather than the metal. The word describes the hole it was poured into.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A form that exists only between two other forms.
What are the genre conventions?
A stacked bar, a stamped weight, and nothing decided about it yet.
How to subvert it
Write it kept as it is.
Try this
Two hundred words about something whose only shape is the one that makes it easy to move.
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.