Monopoly in a dream: what does it mean?
The board game turns up in dreams as a family scene rather than a game, and the reported detail is usually who was winning.
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 enjoy a family sitting down to a formal contest over property, and would ask what is being played out that could not be said at the table.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would attend to the roles the family fall into, since the game distributes them reliably and everyone knows theirs before the first throw.
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?
Under the continuity view this is childhood and Christmas, and the dream usually reproduces the room rather than the rules. Games with strong family associations tend to bring the associations with them into dream reports.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
The game began as a teaching device intended to demonstrate that concentrated land ownership is ruinous, and it was later sold as an entertainment about becoming rich. That reversal is documented and is more interesting than anything the board itself does.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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?
The unfinished game is a reliable domestic image, because everyone has abandoned one, and the abandonment always meant something other than boredom. The rules as printed are also not the rules most families play, and the house variations are inherited exactly as recipes are, which is a small and reliable way to show where somebody grew up.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is a licensed way for a family to be ruthless with each other and to call it play.
What are the genre conventions?
Domestic fiction uses it for a Christmas argument. Literary fiction uses the money afterwards, on the floor.
How to subvert it
Write the person who is winning and desperately wants it to stop.
Try this
Write three hundred words of hour four, with two players left.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.