Tar in a dream: what does it mean?
Tar is reported for the sticking, and dreamers frequently describe trying to get it off their hands or their shoes.
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 a substance that marks and holds, and would ask what the dreamer has stepped in that they cannot get clean of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would take something black and slow that captures whatever touches it as a serviceable image for an obligation or a habit, and would notice how hard the dreamer was working at it.
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?
Under the continuity view this arrives from roads, from roofs and from beaches. Dreams of being stuck or slowed are commonly reported and the substance varies while the structure does not, which suggests the sticking is the content.
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?
Tar and pitch have an extremely long documented use in waterproofing, in preservation and in punishment, and the third of those has left the deepest mark on the language.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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 substance is a gift for anything about complicity, since it marks whoever handles it and cannot be quietly removed. The smell is also the whole memory for a great many readers, since hot tar on a road in summer is one of the most specific and least described sensations there is.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is the physical form of being implicated, which no amount of explanation undoes.
What are the genre conventions?
Historical fiction uses the shipyard. Literary fiction uses a road being resurfaced in August, which smells of it for a week.
How to subvert it
Write somebody working with it competently who does not mind the mess at all.
Try this
Write two hundred words of hands being cleaned with something that does not work.
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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