Signpost in a dream: what does it mean?
A post with arms pointing to named places, which tells a traveller where they are by telling them where everything else is.
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 definition by surroundings. A place is located by its distance from other places, and he would ask how the dreamer would describe where they are.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note which names appear. Only some places are considered worth pointing at, so the post is a statement about importance as well as direction.
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?
Directions and being lost appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records being lost 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?
Many were removed in Britain during the Second World War to hinder an invader, and putting them back afterwards took years, so a great many are post-war replacements.
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?
They were taken down in the war so that an invading army could not read them. Putting them all back took longer than the war did.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Being told where you are by being told where everything else is.
What are the genre conventions?
A white fingerpost at a junction, and two names on it you have never heard of.
How to subvert it
Write the signpost that names nowhere.
Try this
Two hundred words about a place defined entirely by its distance from others.
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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