Consort in a dream: what does it mean?
The person married to the monarch, whose position is entirely relational and who has no role except the one being beside somebody creates.
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 definition by another person. There is no independent content to the position at all, and he would ask who the dreamer was only in relation to.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the asymmetry. A queen consort is called queen and a male consort is usually not called king, which is a rule about titles that says a great deal about the arrangement.
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?
Relationships and identity appear in dream reports, and content analysis records partners among the commonest dream figures.
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?
Consors is a sharer of a lot, from sors, a share or a fate, so a consort is somebody who shares your portion.
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?
A queen consort is called queen and a male one is usually not called king, which says a great deal in one rule about titles.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A position with no content except being beside somebody.
What are the genre conventions?
A second chair, slightly lower.
How to subvert it
Write the consort with their own office.
Try this
Two hundred words about a role defined entirely by another person.
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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