Tempest in a dream: what does it mean?
The old word for a storm big enough to be an event rather than weather, kept alive almost entirely by one play.
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 word rather than the weather, since a dreamer who says tempest instead of storm has reached for something literary and the reaching is the material.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a storm that clears the air and leaves everybody rearranged as a recognisable structure, and would ask what the dream had put back differently.
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?
Real weather does reach dreams, and thunder in the night is frequently built into dream content without waking the sleeper. It is worth ruling out the actual sky before anything else.
Our summary of the incorporation literature. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Shakespeare's storm is raised deliberately by somebody and harms nobody, which is unusual: the wreck is a piece of theatre staged by Prospero and every passenger is put ashore dry. A tempest arranged rather than suffered is a rarer image than it looks. Prospero's first act is to reassure his daughter that nobody has drowned. Miranda has to be told twice.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
A storm that somebody caused, and that hurts nobody, is a far stranger device than a storm that arrives, and it is sitting there unused.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The upheaval that rearranges rather than destroys. Everybody ashore, and nothing the same.
What are the genre conventions?
Raging outside while something is decided indoors.
How to subvert it
Write the person who raised it, watching from a headland, checking nobody drowned.
Try this
Two hundred words about a disaster staged by somebody who is counting heads. One passenger suspects. Nobody believes them.
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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