Slag in a dream: what does it mean?
The glassy waste left when metal is smelted out of its ore, which is a material with no use and a great deal of it.
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 what is separated out. The valuable part is taken and this is what is not it, and he would ask what the dreamer has defined as the leftover.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the later usefulness. It has been used for road stone and for building, so a material defined as waste turned out to be worth something once somebody looked.
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?
Waste and discarded things appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among ordinary reported dream material.
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?
It cools into a hard glassy material rather than a soil, which is why old slag banks stay bare of plants for a very long time.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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?
Nothing grows on it. It cooled into glass rather than into ground, and the banks stay bare long after everything around them has gone green.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
What is left once the valuable part is taken.
What are the genre conventions?
A black bank with a sharp edge, and no grass on it at all.
How to subvert it
Write the slag that is the valuable part.
Try this
Two hundred words about the thing defined by not being wanted.
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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