Ottoman in a dream: what does it mean?
A padded box you put your feet on, which is the rare piece of furniture that stores things, seats people and does neither very well.
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 double use. It holds what is not wanted out and supports the body at the same time, and he would ask what the dreamer rests on top of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the naming. A European room called a low backless seat by the name of an empire, which says more about the room than about the empire.
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?
Household furnishings appear in dream reports, and content analysis records indoor domestic settings as the most frequent dream scenery.
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?
The furniture is named after the Ottoman court, arriving in French and English as a word for seating without a back, which European rooms had largely stopped making.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
Everything soft in the house that has nowhere else to go is inside it, and somebody has their feet on the lid.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A box that is sat on and never quite emptied.
What are the genre conventions?
A buttoned lid, a faint smell of wool, and a spare eiderdown underneath.
How to subvert it
Write the ottoman that is empty.
Try this
Two hundred words about resting your feet on the things you have no room for.
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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