Patron in a dream: what does it mean?
Somebody who supports a person or an institution over time, which is a relationship rather than a gift and comes with expectations.
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 continuing nature of it. This is not a transaction but a relationship, and he would ask who the dreamer depends on regularly.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the effect on the work. A great deal of art was made to a supporter's requirements, so patronage is in the pictures as well as behind them.
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?
Dependence and obligation appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such social content among ordinary 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?
Patronus was the protector of a client in Roman law, an arrangement with duties on both sides, so the word carries an obligation running in both directions.
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 was never one-way. The Roman arrangement had duties on both sides, and everything since has kept some of that and pretended otherwise.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Support that comes with expectations.
What are the genre conventions?
A portrait of a donor kneeling at the edge of a painting he paid for.
How to subvert it
Write the patron who asks nothing.
Try this
Two hundred words about a gift that is a relationship.
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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