Lying in state in a dream: what does it mean?
A body placed where the public may file past, which turns a private death into an occasion that anybody may attend.
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 queue. People wait for many hours to walk past for a few seconds, and he would ask what the dreamer would stand all night to be near.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note what the waiting does. The queue becomes the event and is reported as one, so the mourning is measured in the length of a line.
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?
Crowds and waiting appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records queues and waiting among 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?
Vigils are kept in rotation beside the coffin throughout, so the arrangement includes people standing still for hours as well as people filing past.
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?
The queue is the story. It is reported in miles and hours, and standing in it all night is understood by everybody in it as the point.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A private death made available to everybody.
What are the genre conventions?
A line four miles long at three in the morning, moving a step at a time.
How to subvert it
Write the lying in state nobody attends.
Try this
Two hundred words about waiting all night for four seconds.
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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