Temptation in a dream: what does it mean?
Temptation dreams are reported for the deliberation rather than the act, and dreamers frequently wake before deciding.
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?
This is close to the centre of Freud's account, since he held that a dream can stage a wish the waking mind refuses, and would treat the deliberation as the disguise rather than the content.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would ask what the dreamer would be if they took it, and would treat the dream as a rehearsal of a self rather than of an act.
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?
Dreams involving impulses the dreamer would not act on are common, and there is no association between such content and waking behaviour. Anyone unsettled by having wanted something in a dream can take that as the settled finding rather than as reassurance.
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?
The tempter as a distinct figure is a specific theological development rather than a universal one, and a good many traditions have no such character at all, which is worth knowing before treating the image as basic.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; 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?
Temptation is a plot engine that has been running for three thousand years and its failure mode is always the same, which is that the tempting thing is not made attractive enough for the reader.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is a decision the character makes about who they are, which is why it belongs at the end of an act rather than the start.
What are the genre conventions?
Moral fiction has them refuse. Modern fiction has them accept and finds the consequences less interesting than promised.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who takes it, is entirely happy, and is not punished by the book.
Try this
Write three hundred words of a person standing in a kitchen at midnight.
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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