Intercourse in a dream: what does it mean?
Among the most commonly reported dream subjects there is, and one that people are least likely to mention to anybody.
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.
Freud
Freud is the reason this is the first thing many readers expect a dream dictionary to be about, and it is worth saying that his framework treats a great deal of unrelated material as sexual rather than the other way round.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would frequently decline the literal reading, taking a union of two figures as an image of parts of one person coming together, which is a genuinely different account and not a squeamish one.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Sexual dreams are extremely common, are reported by people of every orientation and relationship status, and frequently involve people the dreamer is not attracted to awake. That last point causes a lot of unnecessary distress: a dream is not a wish, not a confession and not a plan, and dreaming about somebody says nothing about what you want.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., The typical dreams of Canadian university students (2003).Mythological
Medieval writers explained these dreams with incubus and succubus figures, which placed the responsibility outside the sleeper and was in its way a kindness. The framework changed and the need to explain them away did not. Both versions locate the cause outside the sleeper, which is the continuity worth noticing.
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.
In literature
The interesting material is the waking, not the dream: somebody having to be normal at breakfast with a person they dreamed about.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
The dream nobody mentions.
Genre conventions
Used to reveal a hidden desire, which is usually the wrong reading.
How to subvert it
Write somebody entirely untroubled by it, and the friend who cannot let it go.
Try this
Two hundred words about behaving normally at 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.