Pitchfork in a dream: what does it mean?
A tool for moving hay, which is light and bulky, and which became the standard prop for a mob because everybody had one.
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 farm implement being carried at night, since the object has not changed and the entire meaning has.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the crowd rather than the fork, and would ask whether the dreamer was in it, watched by it, or holding one alone.
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?
The mob with torches and pitchforks is an image from film rather than from any particular history, and it has become so fixed that it now describes online behaviour more often than any crowd. The dream is usually borrowing the film.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
The devil's trident is older and separate, borrowed from Poseidon by way of a good deal of medieval art, and the resemblance to a hay fork is coincidence rather than descent. Two different objects converged on one silhouette. Medieval hell scenes needed a recognisable implement and the farm supplied one.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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 reason it works is that it is not a weapon. A crowd carrying whatever was by the barn door is far more frightening than a crowd that came armed.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The ordinary tool carried at the wrong hour.
What are the genre conventions?
Raised outside a castle, with torches, in black and white.
How to subvert it
Write it doing its job: hay, a loft, and an afternoon. The heat under the roof is the memorable part.
Try this
Two hundred words about a crowd holding whatever was nearest. One of them is carrying a rake and feels foolish.
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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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.