Trawler in a dream: what does it mean?
A boat that drags a net along or near the bottom, taking what it finds rather than what it went looking for.
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 indiscriminacy. A method that cannot select what it catches produces a great deal that was not wanted, and he would ask what the dreamer had brought up along with what they were after.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the gear works out of sight. Everything happens on the bottom where nobody can watch it, and the first anyone knows of the result is when it comes over the side.
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?
Occupational work is reproduced reliably in the dreams of those who do it, and continuity research finds dangerous and demanding trades among the strongest waking predictors of dream 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?
The discard is the part of a haul thrown back, and the practice of sorting on deck and returning what has no market has been argued over for as long as the gear has been used.
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?
The sorting happens on deck and most of what goes back over the side does not survive the trip up.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Bringing up what you were not looking for.
What are the genre conventions?
A net coming over the rail, and a deck nobody can walk on.
How to subvert it
Write the haul that is entirely what was wanted.
Try this
Two hundred words about a method that cannot choose what it takes.
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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