Introduction in a dream: what does it mean?
The moment two strangers become named to each other, performed by a third person who is briefly the most important one there.
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 third person. Somebody has to decide that these two should know each other, and he would ask who was doing the arranging in the dreamer's life.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the order. Who is named first, and to whom, was once a whole system of rank, and the residue of it survives in the awkwardness of getting it slightly wrong.
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?
Strangers appear frequently in dream reports, and content analysis records unfamiliar characters as a large minority of the people who appear in ordinary dreams.
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?
Intro-ducere is to lead within, so the word describes bringing somebody inside rather than merely saying two names.
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?
For about four seconds the person doing it is the most important one in the group, and then they are not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The instant two strangers acquire names for each other.
What are the genre conventions?
Three people, one of them stepping back.
How to subvert it
Write the introduction that never happens.
Try this
Two hundred words about being brought inside by somebody else.
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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