Gossip in a dream: what does it mean?
Talk about somebody who is not there, which binds the people talking as reliably as it damages the person discussed.
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 pleasure, which is the part nobody admits. Talking about an absent person is enjoyable in a way that talking to them is not, and he would ask what the dreamer got out of it.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the two effects at once. The same conversation makes the talkers closer and the subject smaller, and it is impossible to have one without the other.
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?
Social interaction dominates dream content, and content analysis records conversation as the most common activity in ordinary dream reports.
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?
A gossip was a god-sib, a godparent, then a woman present at a birth, then a close friend, and only last of all the talk such friends do.
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?
The word meant your child's godparent before it meant anything unkind, and the slide from one to the other took several hundred years.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Closeness bought at the expense of somebody who is not in the room.
What are the genre conventions?
Two heads together, and a third name.
How to subvert it
Write the gossip that is entirely kind.
Try this
Two hundred words about a conversation that costs nothing to the people having it.
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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