Prince in a dream: what does it mean?
The prince in a dream is reported as expected rather than met, and dreamers often say they knew who he was without being told.
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 inheritance, since a prince is defined entirely by what he is waiting for, and would ask what the dreamer is waiting to come into.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
For Jung the figure sits near the young hero, a version of the self that has not yet been tested, and the reading turns on whether the dream sets him a task.
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 arrives from stories rather than from anywhere else, and the dream version is usually the folk tale one rather than any historical figure. Dream characters built from narrative are common and tend to behave according to the story they came from.
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 tale type in which the youngest son succeeds where his brothers fail is one of the most widely distributed there is, and the pattern survives in places with no monarchy at all.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; the Grimm collection).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 figure has been so thoroughly worn by fairy tale and by film that a straight use now reads as pastiche, and most contemporary fiction that wants him has to make him tired, unwilling or wrong.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
He is a character whose whole future is already decided, which makes any refusal of it the entire plot.
What are the genre conventions?
Fantasy keeps the inheritance. Literary fiction gives the same shape to anybody expected to take over a family business.
How to subvert it
Write him as competent, dutiful, and entirely without interiority, and let somebody else be the story.
Try this
Write three hundred words of an heir being fitted for something.
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.
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