Screen crack in a dream: what does it mean?
Damage you look straight through several hours a day, and stop seeing within a week.
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 adaptation. The eye edits out the fracture within days, and he would ask what else the dreamer had stopped noticing by looking past it often enough.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is legible to everybody else. The owner cannot see it and every person they hand it to can, which makes it a fault of a very particular kind.
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?
Damaged or altered objects appear in dream reports, and the neurocognitive account treats such distortions as ordinary products of how dream scenes are assembled.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
A cracked mirror carried a superstition and a cracked window got fixed, and this is the first broken glass most people simply live behind.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
You stop seeing it in a week. Everybody you hand it to sees it immediately.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A flaw looked through rather than at.
What are the genre conventions?
A spiderweb across a photograph of somebody's children.
How to subvert it
Write the crack that is never ignored.
Try this
Two hundred words about a fault only other people can see.
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.