Interruption in a dream: what does it mean?
Being stopped mid-sentence, which takes the thought as well as the turn and rarely gives either back.
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 what is lost. The sentence can be restarted and the thought frequently cannot, and he would ask what the dreamer had been about to say.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note who does it. Interruption runs downhill through whatever hierarchy is in the room, and everybody in the room knows the direction without being told.
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?
Being unable to speak or to be heard is among the recurring themes in the typical-dreams literature, reported alongside falling and being chased.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Rumpere is to break, the root of rupture and bankrupt, so the word is about breaking into rather than merely speaking over.
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?
You can start the sentence again. The thought that was arriving underneath it has usually gone.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A turn taken from somebody who had not finished with it.
What are the genre conventions?
A raised finger, and a mouth closing.
How to subvert it
Write the interruption that rescues the speaker.
Try this
Two hundred words about losing a thought while somebody else talks.
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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