Quagmire in a dream: what does it mean?
Ground that looks solid and is not, which makes it the only landscape that lies to you.
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 discovery rather than the sinking, since the frightening part is the step that was taken in good faith.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take ground that gives way as an image of a footing the dreamer has been relying on, and would ask what it was.
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?
Being stuck and unable to move is among the more commonly reported dream situations and overlaps with sleep paralysis, in which the body genuinely is immobilised. That is ordinary, harmless and much less frightening once it has been explained.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., The typical dreams of Canadian university students (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Peat bogs preserve what falls into them, and the bodies recovered from them across northern Europe are intact enough to show faces and the contents of a last meal. The ground that swallows people is also the ground that keeps them. Tollund Man still has stubble and an expression, after two thousand years.
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 preservation is the turn. A bog is not only a place that takes people; it is the only place that gives them back recognisable.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The ground that lies about being ground. And has done so for as long as anybody has walked it.
What are the genre conventions?
A moor, a mist, and somebody who left the path.
How to subvert it
Write the turf cutter who reads the ground perfectly and is never in danger. He cannot explain how he knows.
Try this
Two hundred words about a step taken in good faith. The ground had looked exactly like the rest of 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.
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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. 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.