Ligament in a dream: what does it mean?
The band that holds one bone to another, which is strong in one direction and does nothing in any other.
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 single direction. A restraint that works against one movement and permits everything else is a very specific rule, and he would ask what the dreamer was prevented from doing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that ligaments define what a joint cannot do. The range of a limb is set by what is stopping it rather than by what is driving it.
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?
Bodily sensation during sleep is incorporated into dreams, and the incorporation literature finds strain and position among the stimuli reflected in reported dream content.
Our summary of the incorporation literature. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
They stretch very little by design, which is what makes them useful and also why a torn one does not simply tighten back up afterwards.
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?
What a joint can do is decided entirely by what is stopping it. The limits are the design.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A rule that forbids one thing and permits everything else.
What are the genre conventions?
A twist, a sound, and a joint that now goes somewhere it should not.
How to subvert it
Write the joint with none.
Try this
Two hundred words about freedom of movement being defined completely by what is holding you back.
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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