Vat in a dream: what does it mean?
A container large enough to work inside, used for dyeing, brewing and tanning, where the process happens by waiting.
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 scale removing control. A quantity too large to stir or adjust quickly means the decisions are all made at the start, and he would ask what the dreamer had committed at volume.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that indigo comes out of the vat green and turns blue in the air. The colour everybody wants appears after the cloth has been lifted out, so the vat never contains the result.
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 settings appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds trades reproduced in detail by the people who work in them.
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?
Indigo has to be reduced in the vat to dissolve, and the cloth comes up yellow-green and turns blue as it oxidises, which looks like a mistake until it happens.
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 cloth comes out of an indigo vat green and turns blue in the air. Anybody watching for the first time thinks it has failed.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A result that only appears after the thing is taken out.
What are the genre conventions?
A deep tank, cloth lifted dripping and green, and a colour arriving.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who pulls it out and throws it away.
Try this
Two hundred words about a process whose result only appears once the thing has left the place it was made.
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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