Substitute in a dream: what does it mean?
Somebody sent on to replace somebody else, which means half a team's players spend the game hoping for a colleague's misfortune.
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 awkward wish. Getting on usually requires an injury or a failure, and he would ask what the dreamer was quietly hoping for.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the walk. Coming off in front of a crowd is a public assessment delivered by your own side, and the applause makes it worse rather than better.
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?
Replacement and being displaced appear in dream reports, and content analysis records social misfortune more often than good fortune.
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?
Substitutes were introduced for injuries only, and the tactical use came later, which is why the language still calls it replacing somebody.
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?
Getting on usually requires somebody else's injury, so a bench is full of people wishing for something they cannot say.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Waiting for a colleague's misfortune.
What are the genre conventions?
A number held up, and a walk to the touchline.
How to subvert it
Write the substitution nobody minds.
Try this
Two hundred words about hoping for a thing you cannot admit to.
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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