Australia in a dream: what does it mean?
A country that appears in dreams as far away rather than as itself is doing a particular job, and dreamers usually report the distance rather than the place.
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 what the distance permitted, since a dream that puts somebody very far off has arranged a separation. He would ask who was left behind.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
For Jung the antipodes can image the opposite of a life, the place where everything is reversed, and its function in the dream is usually structural rather than geographical.
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?
Under the continuity view this usually follows real emigration, real family abroad and real plans. For the very large number of people with relatives there, the plain reading is nearly always the right one.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
The idea of a land on the underside of the world predates any European knowledge of one, and the traditions about it are about symmetry and reversal rather than about any actual place.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer; Bulfinch).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?
Emigration writing is one of the great subjects and Australia has an enormous literature of arrival, transportation and distance. The letter home is its central document.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It supplies separation that cannot be undone quickly, which changes how every relationship in a story works. Distance is a constraint that generates plot without conflict.
What are the genre conventions?
Migration fiction uses the passage. Family sagas use the branch that left. Comedy uses the accent, which is nearly always lazy.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who emigrated forty years ago and has never once been homesick, and make it convincing.
Try this
Write a video call between two people twelve time zones apart. One of them is having breakfast.
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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.