Consecration in a dream: what does it mean?
Setting something apart for a purpose it can no longer be taken back from, which is the only ceremony that is hard to undo.
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 irreversibility. A status is conferred that cannot easily be withdrawn, and he would ask what the dreamer has committed something to permanently.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note what it does to ground. Consecrated land is treated differently in law and in feeling long after the building on it has gone, so the status outlives the structure.
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?
Places and their significance appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such settings among ordinary reported dream scenery.
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?
Deconsecration is a real and separate procedure, which exists because the first act was understood to be permanent unless something equally formal undid it.
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?
There is a whole separate procedure for undoing it. That procedure exists because everybody understood the first one to be permanent.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A status that has to be formally removed.
What are the genre conventions?
A field with no church on it any more, still fenced and still not built on.
How to subvert it
Write the consecration that lapses.
Try this
Two hundred words about a change that requires a ceremony to reverse.
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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