Choreography in a dream: what does it mean?
The composition of a dance, from a word meaning the writing down of it, which is the part that mostly failed.
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 ambition in the name. Somebody meant to record movement the way music is recorded, and he would ask what the dreamer wanted written down and could not write.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note what carries it instead. Dances survive in the bodies of people who were taught them, so the transmission is a chain of people rather than a document.
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?
Memory and things being lost appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among ordinary reported dream material.
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?
Notation systems for dance have been invented repeatedly and none has been adopted the way musical notation was, so a great deal of dance is simply gone.
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?
Music got a notation and dance never really did. What is left of most of it is whoever was taught it by whoever was taught it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A record that was attempted and never worked.
What are the genre conventions?
A page of symbols nobody in the room can read, and a demonstration instead.
How to subvert it
Write the choreography that survives on paper.
Try this
Two hundred words about something that lives only in people.
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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