Impatience in a dream: what does it mean?
Wanting the interval to be over, which does nothing to shorten it and makes the whole of it worse.
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 it being unproductive. A response that changes nothing about the situation and only alters the experience of it is doing something else, and he would ask what the dreamer's hurry was about.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that impatience is future-directed attention with nowhere to go. The person is entirely somewhere that has not happened, which empties the place they are actually in.
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?
Delay and obstruction appear in dream reports, and content analysis finds being prevented from proceeding among the recurring frustrations described in dream narratives.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Waiting was longer and more ordinary before anything could be sent quickly, and letters crossing at sea meant a question and its answer could be months apart with nothing to be done between.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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 question and its answer could be six months apart, and everybody simply carried on in between. The interval was not an insult.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Attention entirely in a place that has not happened.
What are the genre conventions?
A checked watch, a checked watch again, and four minutes gone.
How to subvert it
Write the wait shortened and nothing improving.
Try this
Two hundred words about somebody made miserable by an interval they cannot affect.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.