Diversion in a dream: what does it mean?
A route round something, signed by people who know where you are going and cannot know where you came from.
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 loss of the route. The way you knew is closed and you are following somebody else's plan, and he would ask what the dreamer had to take on trust.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the moment the signs stop. Every diversion has a point where the last arrow was some distance back, and the driver has to decide whether they are still on it.
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?
Being lost and taking wrong turns recur in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records getting lost among the most common situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
The yellow signs are numbered and lettered so that several diversions can overlap without a driver following the wrong one, which is a system almost nobody notices.
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?
Every one has a point where the last arrow was a while ago and you have to decide whether you are still following it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Somebody else's route, taken on trust.
What are the genre conventions?
A yellow arrow, and then a road with none.
How to subvert it
Write the diversion that is shorter.
Try this
Two hundred words about following signs put up by strangers.
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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