Maypole in a dream: what does it mean?
A pole set up on a green for dancing round, which was pulled down by law in England and put back up when the law changed.
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 argument about it. Something harmless enough was legislated against, and he would ask what innocent thing in the dreamer's life somebody objected to.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the ribbons. The plaited version most people picture is a nineteenth-century addition, so the familiar image is younger than the objection to the object.
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?
Gatherings and celebrations appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such social settings among ordinary reported dream content.
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?
They were prohibited under the Commonwealth in the seventeenth century and re-erected at the Restoration, which is an unusual amount of political history for a pole on a green.
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 banned by an act of parliament and put back up when the government changed. Very few village greens have that much politics in them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A harmless thing somebody legislated against.
What are the genre conventions?
Ribbons plaiting down a pole, and one child going the wrong way.
How to subvert it
Write the maypole nobody objected to.
Try this
Two hundred words about something innocent that was made illegal.
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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