Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Objects

4 of 50 entries in Dream Symbols. Click any to see everything it connects to.

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Everyday and symbolic objects as they appear in dreams: keys, mirrors, money, weapons and the like, one of the largest and least unified groups of dream symbols because almost any object can carry a reading in some tradition or other.

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Four Dream Symbols Naming a Thing the Dreamer Handles Rather Than a Place or a Person

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Objects gathers four of the atlas's dream symbols, ordinary things a dreamer owns or handles, and none carries an unbroken tradition into its modern reading.

The car has no interpretive tradition older than itself; neither the classical nor the Talmudic dream literature addresses it, and the now standard reading, that the vehicle stands for the course of a life and the driver's identity shows who controls it, is a twentieth century dictionary invention. Where the older sources treat conveyance at all they use what they had: the Talmud reads riding an ox as ascending to greatness and a boat as reputation.

Keys and money each carry one specific attributed reading. Freud lists the key and lock among the symbols standing for the sexual organs and their conjunction, a reading he treats as almost too obvious to argue, and the Talmudic material does not address keys; the now familiar account of a key as an unlocking of hidden potential is a modern dictionary meaning offered without a source. Money fares no better: Freud connected dream gold to what he called anal erotism, first in a 1908 paper, while the older sources handle wealth concretely, the Talmud reading eating the flesh of an ox as coming wealth. The reading of money as self-worth rests on nothing older than the metaphor inside the word worth.

The mirror has no older dream tradition, though reflections carry omen value in many cultures. Its familiar meaning, that a mirror shows self-image and a cracked one confusion about identity, comes from twentieth century dictionaries and a general Jungian atmosphere rather than anything Jung specifically argued; the nearest genuine material, the covering of mirrors in a house of mourning in Jewish custom, is a waking practice rather than a dream reading.

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