Departure lounge in a dream: what does it mean?
A room people wait in after they have left and before they have gone, which is why it is the emptiest kind of room to be in.
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 suspension. Nothing can be done here and nothing has begun, and he would ask where the dreamer is currently unable to act.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the architecture of it. There are no clocks in some and screens everywhere in others, so a room's whole design is about how people are told to wait.
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?
Waiting and delay appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records missing transport and being held up among the most persistent themes.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
The phrase escaped the airport and is now used about anywhere people are held between two states, including some very unkind uses about old age.
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?
You have left and you have not gone. The country is behind you, the shops are the same as everywhere, and you cannot go back through the door.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A place between having left and having gone.
What are the genre conventions?
A board that says wait in lounge, and a seat with fixed metal arms.
How to subvert it
Write the departure lounge nobody waits in.
Try this
Two hundred words about being unable to act or arrive.
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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