Laughing in a dream: what does it mean?
Laughing in a dream is reported less often than the emotional weather of dreams would suggest, and dreamers frequently wake to find they were laughing at nothing describable.
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 gave a whole book to jokes and their relation to the unconscious, and would treat dream laughter as a release rather than as evidence that anything was funny.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would ask who was laughing and whether the dreamer was included, since being laughed at and laughing along are entirely different dreams that report the same sound.
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?
Emotion coding in the dream literature found negative emotions substantially more frequent than positive ones in reported dreams, with joy and amusement present but outnumbered. Whether that reflects dreaming or reporting is still argued, since pleasant dreams are less likely to wake anyone and less likely to be written down.
Our summary of the norms in Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966). The norms are old and the samples were students.What do myth and folklore say?
Ritual laughter is attested in a striking range of traditions, at funerals as often as at festivals, and it is very often obligatory rather than spontaneous.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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?
Laughter on the page almost never works, because the reader is being told that something was funny rather than finding it so, and the gap is immediately visible. Most good comic writing simply omits the laughing.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Shared laughter establishes an alliance faster than any dialogue can, which is why it is so often used to show a friendship the plot has no room to build.
What are the genre conventions?
Comic fiction avoids describing it. Literary fiction describes it and usually means that something is wrong.
How to subvert it
Write a room laughing at something the reader is not told, and never reveal it.
Try this
Write two hundred words of one person laughing too long after everyone else has stopped.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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