Shooting in a dream: what does it mean?
Firing rather than being fired at is a distinct dream and is reported with a specific detachment, and dreamers frequently say the gun made no noise.
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 distance, since a shot lets harm be done without contact, and would ask what the dreamer wanted done without touching it.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would attend to the target, and would treat a dream in which the dreamer fires at a figure as material about a part of themselves rather than about 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?
Aggression appears in dreams at rates that surprise people, and violent dream content is not associated with violent waking behaviour. The silence and the ineffectiveness that dreamers report, a gun that will not fire or makes no sound, are common and are consistent with how dreams handle intended action generally.
Our summary of the norms in Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966). The norms are old and the samples were students.What do myth and folklore say?
Ritual and legal rules governing who may kill, with what, and in what circumstances are close to universal, and they are always more elaborate than the prohibition itself.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Bulfinch).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?
Fiction has a persistent problem with the aftermath, since firing takes a second and the consequences take years, and most books allocate the wrong proportion to each. The vocabulary is also a giveaway, since people who shoot do not talk about it the way films do, and a single wrong word will cost a writer every reader who does.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is a decision made at a distance, which is why it appears in so much writing about bureaucratic violence.
What are the genre conventions?
Thrillers make it clean. War writing makes it inaccurate, which is far closer to the accounts.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who misses deliberately and never says so.
Try this
Write four hundred words of a person cleaning up afterwards.
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.
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