Quay in a dream: what does it mean?
The edge where land is organised entirely around water, and the last solid thing under anybody leaving.
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 person left standing on it, since a departure has two halves and only one of them is going anywhere.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the quay as the threshold between two elements, and would notice which way the dreamer was facing.
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?
Emigration is a live rather than historical memory across Ireland and much of Britain, and a dream set on a quay frequently carries a specific family departure with it rather than a general idea of leaving.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The word is spelled nothing like it sounds because it came from Norman French and the pronunciation shifted while the spelling did not. It is one of the more reliable traps for anybody reading English aloud. It rhymes with key, which almost nobody guesses from the spelling.
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 one who stays is the harder and better point of view, and it is almost always given to the one who goes. The person on the quay has to turn round first, and everybody watching knows when.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The last solid ground. Held by whoever is not getting on the boat.
What are the genre conventions?
A handkerchief, a receding ship, and a held pose.
How to subvert it
Write the walk home from the quay afterwards. The house has to be got through, room by room.
Try this
Two hundred words about going back to an empty house. The kettle is still warm.
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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