Seesaw in a dream: what does it mean?
A plank on a pivot, where nobody rises unless somebody else goes down, and the whole thing stops if one end gets off.
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 abandonment. The known cruelty of the seesaw is getting off while the other end is up, and he would ask who in the dreamer's life had the ground and who had the air.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that height is borrowed. Neither end owns its position, each holds it only while the other supplies the weight, which makes it a picture of a relation rather than of a person.
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?
Playground and childhood settings recur in adult dream reports, and the continuity view treats them as carry-over from remembered places rather than as symbols requiring translation.
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.What do myth and folklore say?
The name is thought to come from the call sawyers made working a pit saw in turn, one down while the other came up, which is the same motion at work.
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 high end is not an achievement. It is a loan from whoever is sitting on the ground.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A position that exists only while somebody else keeps their weight on.
What are the genre conventions?
Two children, one plank, and a moment of stillness in the middle.
How to subvert it
Write the pair who balance perfectly and are bored.
Try this
Two hundred words about being up because somebody else is down, and knowing 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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