Mousetrap in a dream: what does it mean?
A device that has to be set against its own spring, so the most dangerous moment for the person is before anything is caught.
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 setting rather than the catching, since arming a thing that could hurt you is a more interesting act than finding it has worked.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a trap that requires bait as a picture of a hazard that only works on somebody who wants something, and would ask what the dream had put on it.
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?
Mice are among the more commonly reported household animals in dreams and usually arrive with a real infestation or a real fear of one. The sound at night is frequently the actual cause.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Mice do not much like cheese and are better baited with chocolate or peanut butter, which is a piece of folklore surviving entirely on cartoons. The Mousetrap has also been running in the West End since 1952, which is its own kind of trap. Audiences are asked at the end not to reveal the ending, and largely have not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer). The 1952 play is not from Brewer, who died in 1897; that is ours.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 cheese being wrong is a small free gift: a character who bakes it into their trap tells you they learned from television.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The danger that only works on somebody who wants something.
What are the genre conventions?
Snapped in the night, offstage, for a jump.
How to subvert it
Write the humane trap and the drive out to the woods with a shoebox.
Try this
Two hundred words about setting something that could hurt you.
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.
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.