Grimace in a dream: what does it mean?
The face contorting at something unpleasant, including things happening to somebody else, which is the point of it.
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 borrowed pain. Watching an injury produces the expression of having one, and he would ask whose hurt the dreamer had been wearing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is a warning to whoever is watching. A face contorting tells everybody nearby that something is wrong before anybody has said a word.
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?
Distress and unpleasant events are recorded more often than pleasant ones in ordinary dream reports, and content analysis finds this consistently.
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?
Grimace shares a root with grim, and both come from a word for a mask, which is where the theatre sense and the facial one meet.
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 do it watching somebody else get hurt, which means the face is reporting a pain that is not yours.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An expression borrowed from somebody else's injury.
What are the genre conventions?
A whole room making the same face at once.
How to subvert it
Write the grimace at good news.
Try this
Two hundred words about wearing a pain you are only watching.
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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