Water gun in a dream: what does it mean?
The water pistol is reported for the disappointment, and dreamers frequently describe firing it at somebody who does not react.
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 enjoy a weapon that cannot hurt anybody, and would ask what the dreamer wanted to do without consequences.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would notice that the dream has produced the form of aggression with the content removed, which is a fairly precise image and one worth sitting with.
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?
Aggression appears in dreams at rates that surprise people, and the harmless version is reported alongside the serious kind. Under the continuity view this usually arrives from childhood and from summer, and its emotional tone follows the dreamer's memory rather than the object.
Our summary of the norms in Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966). The norms are old and the samples were students. The reading also uses the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972).What do myth and folklore say?
Water-throwing festivals are real, very widespread and considerably older than the toy, and several of them are among the largest public celebrations anywhere.
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?
Play violence is a genuinely difficult subject, since a book that finds it sinister is usually wrong about children and a book that finds it innocent is usually wrong about adults. The object also has a genuine design history, since the pressurised version changed what the game was, and anybody who was a child at the point that arrived remembers the shift exactly.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is a rehearsal with the harm taken out, which is what most play is and why it unsettles people who have forgotten that.
What are the genre conventions?
Children's fiction uses the fight. Literary fiction uses an adult who takes it too seriously.
How to subvert it
Write a game that stops being fun and let nobody be able to say when.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a garden on the hottest day of the year.
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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