Laudanum in a dream: what does it mean?
A tincture of opium in alcohol, sold across the counter for a century to anybody, including for quieting infants.
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 availability. A powerful preparation on open sale in a grocer's shop was not hidden or restricted, and he would ask what the dreamer could obtain without any question being asked.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it was given to babies. Soothing syrups containing it were sold for teething, and the quiet they produced was taken as the medicine working.
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?
Illness and remedies appear in dream reports, and continuity research finds health content following waking experience rather than carrying independent meaning.
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?
It was cheaper than gin and taxed less, and the Pharmacy Act was the first serious attempt in Britain to restrict who could sell it and require it to be labelled.
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 was cheaper than gin and taxed less, which is most of why it was everywhere. Legislation came a very long way behind.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Something powerful sold without a single question.
What are the genre conventions?
A bottle on a grocer's shelf, priced below the beer.
How to subvert it
Write the first label.
Try this
Two hundred words about something available to anybody, for anything, at less than the price of a drink.
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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