Utensils in a dream: what does it mean?
The drawer of things a kitchen has accumulated, most of which are used once a year and none of which can be thrown away.
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 drawer that will not close, since it is a household's accumulated intentions and nobody can name half of what is in it.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take inherited kitchen tools as carrying specific people, since almost every drawer has something in it that belonged to somebody dead.
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?
Kitchens are among the most frequently reported dream settings and the objects in them are recalled with unusual accuracy, including damage: a bent tine, a burnt handle, a knife that everybody in the family knows not to use.
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?
Single-purpose kitchen gadgets are a nineteenth-century invention and were sold on the same argument used today, that a specialised tool does the job better. Most drawers contain the evidence that it usually does not. A knife and a spoon do nine tenths of it. The rest is optimism in metal.
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 one knife everybody in the house knows not to use, and nobody has thrown away, is a whole family in an object.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The accumulated intentions of a household. Nobody can name half of it.
What are the genre conventions?
Rummaged through, noisily, during a tense conversation. Nothing in it is what they said they were looking for.
How to subvert it
Write an inventory of the drawer and who each thing belonged to. Four of them belonged to somebody dead.
Try this
Two hundred words about a drawer that will not close. Three attempts, and then it is left open.
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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