Locket in a dream: what does it mean?
Jewellery designed to hide something, which makes it the only ornament whose real content is invisible to everybody looking at it.
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 opening, since a locket is worn closed and the decision to show somebody what is inside is a specific and deliberate act.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take something carried against the body and not displayed as a workable image of what a person keeps close without discussing, and would ask what the dream one held.
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?
Lockets in dreams are overwhelmingly inherited and usually still contain whatever the previous owner put in them, which is what dreamers report. The content was chosen by somebody who is generally dead.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Victorian mourning lockets often held woven hair rather than a picture, since hair survives and does not fade, and hairwork was a substantial craft with its own patterns. A photograph was the later and less durable option. Hair keeps its colour for centuries and a Victorian photograph fades in decades.
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?
Hair rather than a photograph is the detail that unsettles a modern reader, and it was the more sensible choice at the time.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The kept thing nobody can see. Chosen by somebody who is generally dead.
What are the genre conventions?
Opened at a crucial moment, revealing a face. Usually somebody the reader has met.
How to subvert it
Write one nobody can open, and the family disagreement about forcing it. It has been closed since 1948.
Try this
Two hundred words about something worn every day that nobody has seen inside. Somebody asks and is refused, politely.
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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