Reminder in a dream: what does it mean?
Being told what you already know, which is the only message whose content is irrelevant to its effect.
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 irritation. Nothing new is conveyed and something is felt anyway, and he would ask what the dreamer heard underneath the ordinary sentence.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it implies a doubt. To remind somebody is to say you thought they might not, and everybody hears that part whether it was meant or not.
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?
Waking concerns carry directly into dream content, and the continuity view treats unfinished tasks and appointments as ordinary material rather than as signals.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
A knot in a handkerchief carried the same job for centuries, and it worked by being inexplicable later, which is the whole trick of it.
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?
It says nothing new and communicates plenty, because being reminded means somebody thought you might not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A message whose content does not matter.
What are the genre conventions?
A note left where it cannot be missed.
How to subvert it
Write the reminder that is welcome.
Try this
Two hundred words about being told something you already knew.
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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