Quarry in a dream: what does it mean?
A hole made by removing a building, which is why every old town is standing in a landscape shaped by its own absence.
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 word carrying two meanings at once, since a quarry is both the place dug and the thing hunted, and the dream may be using either.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a landscape defined by what has been taken out of it as a workable image, and would ask what the dreamer had extracted and where it went.
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?
Flooded quarries are a genuine and recurring danger, because the water is far colder than it looks and the sides are sheer. That is worth stating plainly, since the image reaches most dreamers as an attractive place to swim.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
The two senses come from different roots that collided in English, one from a square of cut stone and one from the parts of a kill given to the hounds. Two unrelated words arrived at one spelling and English kept both. Which is why a hunted animal and a hole in a hillside are homonyms for no reason at all.
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 building and its hole are one object seen twice. A cathedral and the valley it came out of are the same stone in two arrangements.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The absence shaped like what was built.
What are the genre conventions?
Flooded, blue, and somebody about to jump in.
How to subvert it
Write the match between the hole and the church, made by the same men.
Try this
Two hundred words about a place defined by what was taken away.
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.
-
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.
-
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.