Pigment in a dream: what does it mean?
The coloured solid a paint is made of, which is a ground-up substance and is the reason certain colours were once ruinously expensive.
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 substance behind the colour. Every colour is a specific material dug or made, and he would ask what the dreamer thinks of as pure that came out of the ground.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the effect on subjects. The most costly blue was reserved for particular figures, so the price of a mineral decided who in a picture was painted in what.
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?
Colours appear in dream reports, and content analysis records colour among ordinary features of reported dreams.
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?
Ultramarine means beyond the sea, because the stone it was ground from had to be imported, and the name records the journey rather than the colour.
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?
Ultramarine means from beyond the sea. The colour is named after how far the rock had to travel, and contracts specified how much of it a painter had to use.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A colour that is really a material with a price.
What are the genre conventions?
A stoppered jar of powder, heavier than it looks.
How to subvert it
Write the pigment that costs nothing.
Try this
Two hundred words about a colour with a price and a journey.
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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