Skittles in a dream: what does it mean?
Nine pins stood up in order so that a ball can knock them down, which is the oldest shape a game can have.
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 resetting. A game whose entire labour is standing back up what was just flattened is about repetition rather than victory, and he would ask what the dreamer keeps putting straight.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the arrangement. The pins are placed in a fixed figure before every throw, so the disorder is created and the order is the starting condition, which is the reverse of most work.
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?
Repetitive activity is commonly reported in dreams, and the continuity view reads it as carry-over from the repetitive activity of waking life rather than as a signal in itself.
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?
Life is not all beer and skittles, meaning it is not all the alehouse and the game behind it, which is where the phrase places both.
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 player throws once and then spends longer standing them all back up than the throw took.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Order as the thing you build in order to destroy it.
What are the genre conventions?
Nine shapes in a diamond, and one gap where a tenth should be.
How to subvert it
Write the setter-up as the one enjoying it.
Try this
Two hundred words about a game where the tidying is most of the work and nobody minds.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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.