Sconce in a dream: what does it mean?
A bracket that holds a light against a wall, which puts the flame at head height and out of reach of anything that could knock it over.
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 fixing. The light is attached to the room rather than carried, and he would ask what the dreamer had decided could no longer be moved.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the shielding. The earliest ones were screened lanterns, so the object began as a way of hiding a light while still using it.
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?
Rooms and their fittings appear in dream reports, and content analysis records indoor settings far more often than outdoor ones.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Sconce comes through French from abscondere, to hide away, which is also behind abscond. The small earthwork fort called a sconce is a separate word borrowed from Dutch.
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?
A light nailed to the wall cannot be taken to bed, and that is the whole point of it. Somebody decided where in this house you are allowed to see.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The light that belongs to the building rather than to you.
What are the genre conventions?
Two brass arms on a papered wall, and a stub of candle in each.
How to subvert it
Write the sconce somebody has carried off.
Try this
Two hundred words about a light fixed where you cannot move 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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