Mauve in a dream: what does it mean?
The first synthetic dye, discovered by accident by an eighteen-year-old trying to make quinine, and the colour that started an industry.
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 a dreamer who names a colour this precisely, since most people report red or blue and somebody who says mauve has a reason to know the word.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a colour that carries a decade with it as worth noticing, since mauve dates a dream to a room rather than a feeling.
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?
Most dreams are reported in colour, though people asked in the era of black and white television reported dreaming in monochrome far more often, which is a striking finding about how much reporting is shaped by expectation.
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?
William Perkin found it in 1856 while trying to synthesise quinine from coal tar, patented it at eighteen, and made a fortune. Purple had been the most expensive colour in the world, made from sea snails, and a teenager made it cheap. Queen Victoria wore it to her daughter's wedding and the fashion followed within a year.
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?
An eighteen-year-old failing to make a malaria drug and inventing the chemical industry instead is a true story that reads as invention.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The accident that became an industry.
What are the genre conventions?
A dated colour, used to signal an unfashionable decade.
How to subvert it
Write the failed experiment, and the stain in the beaker.
Try this
Two hundred words about failing at one thing and succeeding at another. He is eighteen and does not yet know which.
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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