Pins and needles in a dream: what does it mean?
Two small sharp objects borrowed to name a feeling, because there was no word for it and the sewing box was to hand.
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 naming. A sensation described entirely by objects that are not present tells you the feeling arrived before the vocabulary, and he would ask what else the dreamer describes only by comparison.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the second meaning. To be on pins and needles is to be waiting, so the phrase covers a numb foot and an unbearable suspense with the same two objects.
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?
Limb position and pressure during sleep are commonly incorporated into dreams, and the incorporation literature records the sleeper's body turning up inside the dream's own events.
Our summary of the incorporation literature. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
The phrase is older than any account of what causes the sensation, so the description outlived several explanations and will probably outlive the current one.
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?
Somebody had to reach for the sewing box to describe a foot, and everyone has agreed with them ever since.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A feeling with no word of its own, wearing borrowed ones.
What are the genre conventions?
A foot set down carefully, and a wince.
How to subvert it
Write the waiting kind and the sitting kind as the same thing.
Try this
Two hundred words about naming a sensation after objects that are nowhere near it.
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.