Consultant in a dream: what does it mean?
The person whose opinion ends the discussion, who sees you for eleven minutes after you have waited four months.
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 compression. Months of worry are brought to a short appointment, and he would ask what the dreamer had failed to say in the time available.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the authority. Everybody else in the building defers, so the patient meets an opinion that has already been agreed to be final before it is given.
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?
Authority figures appear throughout dream reports, and content analysis records the dreamer as more often acted upon than acting.
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?
Consultants in Britain are addressed as Mr rather than Dr, a survival from when surgeons were barbers and not physicians, and it is kept as a mark of rank.
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?
Four months of waiting arrive at eleven minutes, and everything you meant to say has to fit inside them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An opinion agreed to be final before it is given.
What are the genre conventions?
A door, a desk, and a folder already open.
How to subvert it
Write the consultant with an afternoon to spare.
Try this
Two hundred words about compressing a year of worry into a short appointment.
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.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.