Settle in a dream: what does it mean?
A wooden bench with a high back and arms, often with the seat lifting to reveal a box, which is a chair and a chest and a draught screen at once.
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 back of it. It is built tall to keep the cold off the person sitting, and he would ask what the dreamer puts between themselves and the room.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the seat that opens. Sitting on the household's stored goods is a very old arrangement and it recurs wherever space is short.
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?
Furniture and domestic interiors appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such settings as the commonest scenery in dreams.
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?
The word is the same one as settling in the sense of coming to rest, and the furniture and the verb kept company for centuries.
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?
You sit on the family's belongings, with your back to the door and your knees to the fire, which is the whole design of a cold house.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A seat that is also a box and a wall.
What are the genre conventions?
High oak back, a hollow sound under the seat, and the fire in front.
How to subvert it
Write the settle with nothing inside it.
Try this
Two hundred words about sitting on everything you own.
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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