Plughole in a dream: what does it mean?
The hole a basin empties through, which is where small things go when they are dropped and are almost never recovered.
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 irreversibility. A ring goes in and the moment is over, and he would ask what the dreamer lost in a second and could not get back.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the trap below. There is a bend under it holding water, so things dropped are often still there and nobody knows to look.
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?
Losing things appears in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records losing objects among the most persistent themes.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
The U-bend exists to keep a plug of water in the pipe and stop the smell of the drains coming up, and catching dropped rings is a side effect of that.
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?
It is usually still there. There is a bend in the pipe holding water, and whatever went down is sitting in it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A second of carelessness with no way back.
What are the genre conventions?
A ring turning once on white enamel and going.
How to subvert it
Write the plughole that gives things back.
Try this
Two hundred words about a loss that took one second.
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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