What does it mean to dream about reuniting?
Dreaming of reuniting with someone often reflects a longing for connection, or a wish to recover something a parting took from you.
Four ways to 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.
Freud
Freud would read the reunion as a wish fulfilled, the dream restoring a presence that waking life has lost or withheld. The returning figure may stand for more than the person alone. He would ask what the dreamer truly hopes to have back.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung might see a coming together of parts long separated, within the self as much as without. Reunion can mark the recovery of something the dreamer had let drift. He would ask what is being made whole again.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
By the continuity view, reunion dreams often follow waking absence, longing, or recent distance from someone you care about. The mind grants the meeting it misses. It tends to track a real wish for closeness.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
The longed-for return runs through many stories, the traveller home at last, the lost one found, the family gathered again. Such reunions carry deep relief and the weight of all the waiting before. The dream may echo that old joy of being together once more.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; Brewer).For writers
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.
In literature
Homer makes Odysseus wait through an entire book of recognitions, and the famous one is not with a person but with a dog: Argos knows him, and dies. The delay is the technique. Shakespeare's late romances use the same engine, holding families apart for years so that the reunion can carry the accumulated weight.
Homer, Odyssey XVII (c. 8th century BCE); Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (c. 1611). Both public domain.What it does in a story
A reunion measures elapsed time, since the reader learns how long it has been from how much recognition costs. It is the natural close of a separation plot, and it fails whenever the separation has not been expensive enough.
Genre conventions
Romance and adventure want it warm and want it to complete the arc. Literary fiction wants it awkward, since people who have been apart usually have nothing to say. War and migration writing want the reunion that reveals the separation was permanent regardless of the meeting.
How to subvert it
Write the reunion as an anticlimax where both people are polite, busy, and slightly relieved when it ends, and let the reader carry the grief neither character will admit to.
Try this
Write two people meeting after fifteen years and discussing parking, weather, and a mutual acquaintance. Nothing else.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on. 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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
-
Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.