Razor in a dream: what does it mean?
The razor is reported at the moment before use, and dreamers frequently describe an unsteady hand.
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.
Freud
Freud would take a blade used deliberately on the body as an image of controlled cutting, and would ask what the dreamer is trimming back.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would attend to grooming as an act of self-management, and would notice that the dream nearly always involves the risk rather than the result.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Under the continuity view this is a daily object for a great many people and arrives as ordinary residue. Where a dream involves harm rather than grooming, that is worth talking to somebody about, and a doctor or a support line is the right place rather than a symbol dictionary.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.Mythological
The straight razor and the barber's shop carried real social weight as a male gathering place, and the trade had its own guild history, which is a long way from the object's later reputation.
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.
In literature
The shaving scene is one of the most reliably tense in fiction because the reader supplies the danger unaided, and it has the advantage of being entirely ordinary. The object also dates a scene exactly, since safety razor, straight razor, disposable and electric each belong to a period, and readers who shave will notice a mismatch before anything else in the paragraph.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It puts a blade in a character's hand for reasons nobody can object to.
Genre conventions
Thrillers use the barber. Literary fiction uses a man shaving badly in a hotel bathroom.
How to subvert it
Write somebody shaving another person with complete competence and tenderness.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a face being done carefully in poor light.
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.