Itinerary in a dream: what does it mean?
A plan of a journey written before it happens, which is the document most likely to be departed from and most reassuring to hold.
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 comfort of it. It rarely survives contact and is prepared anyway, and he would ask what plan the dreamer needed to have made rather than to follow.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note who it is really for. It is often written for the people staying behind, so a document about somebody's movements is addressed to their absence.
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?
Plans and journeys appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among frequent reported dream material.
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?
Iter is a journey in Latin, the same root as itinerant, so the word for the plan and the word for having no fixed home come from one place.
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?
It is left on a kitchen table for somebody else. The traveller has a copy and does not look at it after the second day.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A plan whose value is in having been made.
What are the genre conventions?
A printed sheet with times on it, folded in four, in a bag.
How to subvert it
Write the itinerary followed exactly.
Try this
Two hundred words about a plan written for the people staying behind.
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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