Waxwing in a dream: what does it mean?
A bird that arrives in numbers some winters and not at all in others, turning up in supermarket car parks to strip the berries.
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 irregularity. An arrival that cannot be predicted and does not follow a season removes the comfort of expectation, and he would ask what the dreamer waited for without a date.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note where they turn up. They come for the berries on planted ornamental trees, so the most exotic bird most people see is in a retail car park.
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?
Birds appear in dream reports according to actual exposure, and continuity research finds unusual sightings occurring after real encounters rather than being distributed generally.
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 red tips on the wing feathers look like sealing wax and give the bird its name, and the irruptions follow failures of the berry crop further north rather than any cycle.
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 most exotic bird most people in Britain will ever see turns up in a supermarket car park, for the rowans planted round the edge.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An arrival with no date attached to it.
What are the genre conventions?
A flock stripping a rowan by a trolley bay, and forty people with cameras.
How to subvert it
Write the year they do not come.
Try this
Two hundred words about something wonderful that arrives without warning in the least likely place.
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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