Pin in a dream: what does it mean?
A fastening meant to be temporary, which is why finding one still holding something years later is unsettling.
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 a small sharp thing that is easy to lose and painful to find, and would be interested in a dreamer who stood on one.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a provisional fastening that has become permanent as a workable image, and would ask how long the dreamer's arrangement had been meant to last.
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?
Pins in the mouth is a real habit of anybody who sews, and dreamers who do it report the specific anxiety of talking with them held between the lips. It is the sort of physical detail that arrives from practice rather than symbolism.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Pins were valuable enough that a woman's allowance for small personal expenses was called pin money, and the phrase long outlived the price. Bent pins were dropped into holy wells across Britain and Ireland as offerings, and are still found when they are dredged. The bending is the significant act: the object had to be made useless before it could be given.
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 bent pin in a well is the image worth carrying: somebody deliberately ruined a valuable small object and dropped it in water, and thousands of them are down there.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The temporary fix still holding.
What are the genre conventions?
Held in the mouth during a fitting, or found in a hem.
How to subvert it
Write the well, and the bending, and why it had to be spoiled first.
Try this
Two hundred words about a temporary arrangement that has lasted years.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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