Lapis lazuli in a dream: what does it mean?
A deep blue stone that was ground into the most expensive pigment ever used, so painters spent more on the blue than on their own wages.
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 expense. A colour that costs more than everything around it forces a decision about who gets painted in it, and he would ask what the dreamer had reserved for one person.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the stone had to travel enormous distances before it could be used. The blue of European altarpieces came out of mountains most of the painters could not have placed on a map.
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?
Colour is described inconsistently in dream reports, and content analysis finds it noted mainly when it is unusual or emphatic rather than as a routine feature of the scene.
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?
Ultramarine means beyond the sea, and the contracts for altarpieces often specified how much of it a painter had to use, priced by weight against gold.
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?
Painters had contracts specifying how much blue to use, weighed against gold. The colour was a line item.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The one thing too expensive to give to everybody in the picture.
What are the genre conventions?
A blue that does not look like paint, and a patron checking the bill.
How to subvert it
Write the painter using it on someone unimportant.
Try this
Two hundred words about a resource so costly that using it was a statement about who mattered.
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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