Enchantment in a dream: what does it mean?
A state somebody has been put under rather than an act done to them, which makes it the only kind of magic described from the inside.
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 suspension of judgement. Somebody continues to act while not being themselves, and he would ask what the dreamer did that they now cannot account for.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the ordinary use. The word survives in everyday English as a description of being charmed by somebody, which keeps the original claim almost intact.
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?
Altered states and not being in control appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records such loss of agency among persistent themes.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
It is from cantare, to sing, the same family as chant and charm, so being enchanted is literally being sung at.
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?
The everyday sense has barely softened. Saying somebody is enchanting still says they have done something to you that you did not agree to.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A condition rather than an act.
What are the genre conventions?
Somebody behaving perfectly normally and doing something they would not.
How to subvert it
Write the enchantment somebody notices.
Try this
Two hundred words about acting while not being yourself.
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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