Pike in a dream: what does it mean?
A very long spear used in blocks, where the weapon is useless alone and almost unbreakable when hundreds are held together.
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 it requiring everybody. A weapon that works only in formation makes the individual entirely dependent on the people beside them, and he would ask what the dreamer could not do unless everybody held.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the block breaks all at once. A pike square holds completely or collapses completely, with very little between, so the failure mode is total.
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?
Threat and being overwhelmed appear in dream reports, and content analysis records apprehension among the most frequently recorded emotions in dream narratives.
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?
Push of pike describes two blocks meeting and shoving, and pike and shot armies paired them with musketeers because neither arm could survive on its own.
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?
Two blocks of pikes meeting simply pushed. It was called push of pike and it was closer to a scrum than a fight.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Useless alone and nearly unbreakable together.
What are the genre conventions?
Eighteen feet of ash, held level, and four hundred men not moving.
How to subvert it
Write one man with one.
Try this
Two hundred words about something that works completely or fails completely, with nothing in between.
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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