Midge in a dream: what does it mean?
A biting fly small enough to pass through most netting, which arrives in numbers that have altered where people are willing to go.
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 effect of the negligible. Something individually beneath notice that in quantity determines behaviour reverses the usual relation of size to power, and he would ask what small thing was running the dreamer's decisions.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that only the females bite and only before laying. The torment is a stage in something else entirely and is not directed at anyone.
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?
Physical sensations during sleep are incorporated into dream content, and the incorporation literature finds itching, touch and skin irritation among the stimuli most readily taken up into a dream.
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 are said to have delayed roads and emptied campsites, and a still, damp evening with no wind is the condition that brings them out in the numbers that clear a glen.
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?
A breeze of a few miles an hour grounds them completely. The entire problem is solved by wind and by nothing else.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The negligible thing that decides where people will go.
What are the genre conventions?
A still evening by water, and everyone going indoors at once.
How to subvert it
Write the one still evening somebody stays out.
Try this
Two hundred words about something too small to see that determines what everybody does.
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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