Notice period in a dream: what does it mean?
The weeks between deciding to leave and being allowed to, during which everybody knows and nothing is normal.
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 strange status. Present, paid and already gone, and he would ask what the dreamer had been in the room for after the decision was made.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it protects both sides. It is written for the employer and it gives the leaver a month of goodwill they would not otherwise have, which is rarely how it feels.
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?
Transitions and endings appear in dream reports, and content analysis records changes of setting and role among common dream events.
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?
Gardening leave is the version where they pay you to stay away, and the phrase is almost affectionate about a fairly cold arrangement.
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 are present, paid and already gone, and everybody in the building is being slightly kinder than usual.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Time spent somewhere you have already left.
What are the genre conventions?
A desk being cleared slowly, over three weeks.
How to subvert it
Write the notice period that flies.
Try this
Two hundred words about being in a room you have already walked out of.
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.
-
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.
-
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.