Power line in a dream: what does it mean?
Infrastructure nobody wants to look at, strung across country that people otherwise describe as unspoiled.
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 hum, since a line audible from beneath it produces unease in people who know perfectly well what it is.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a network crossing a landscape and connecting places the people beneath it never think about as a workable image of a system nobody chose and everybody depends on.
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 crackle in damp weather is corona discharge, which is real and harmless, and the long-running concern about health effects from power lines has been studied extensively without producing a clear finding. The unease is genuine and the mechanism is not established.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Pylon designs were chosen by competition in Britain in the 1920s and the winning lattice tower has barely changed since. The word pylon was borrowed from Egyptian temple gateways by somebody trying to make them sound less industrial. The objection to them was organised and included several well-known writers.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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 name being borrowed from temple architecture, deliberately, to soften public objection is the useful fact, and it did not work.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The system everybody uses and nobody wants to see. Objected to in writing since the 1920s.
What are the genre conventions?
Marching across a field, to signal encroachment. Photographed from below, deliberately.
How to subvert it
Write the 1920s design competition, and the losing entries. One of them was considerably stranger.
Try this
Two hundred words about naming something to make it acceptable. It did not work and the name stuck anyway.
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.