Excursion in a dream: what does it mean?
A short trip out from wherever you are staying, which is a journey inside a journey and is usually booked from a desk in a foyer.
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 return built in. It is defined by coming back to the same bed, and he would ask what the dreamer ventures out from and returns to.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the older sense. Excursion trains were how a great many people first travelled more than a few miles from home, so a word for a day out is tied to the arrival of the railway.
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?
Journeys and returning 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?
Excurrere is to run out, so the word describes going out and implies coming back, which is exactly the shape of the thing.
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 a journey that has to end where it started. That is not a limitation of it, it is the definition.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Going out from somewhere you will come back to.
What are the genre conventions?
A coach at eight in the morning, and the same coach at six.
How to subvert it
Write the excursion that does not come back.
Try this
Two hundred words about a journey inside another one.
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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