Abuse in a dream: what does it mean?
Dreams of being harmed by someone are reported by people who have been harmed and by people who have not, and a dream on its own tells you nothing about which of those you are.
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.
Freud
Freud treated the remembered scene as already worked over by the time it reached the dreamer, and he was not consistent about how far a dream reflects real events. That inconsistency is the honest part to carry forward. He would look at who has been placed in the role rather than at the role itself.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would attend to the figure doing the harm as a figure, and would ask what the dreamer has learned to expect from that kind of person. It would not treat the image as a recovered memory, and neither should anyone else.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
People with a history of abuse do report replaying and near-replaying dreams at higher rates than people without, and those dreams tend to change shape as waking distress changes. That is a group pattern and it does not run backwards. A dream cannot establish that something happened. If these dreams are frequent, or you wake frightened, that is worth taking to a doctor or a support line rather than to a dictionary.
Our summary of trauma-dream research. See Barrett, ed., Trauma and Dreams (1996). Dream content is not treated in that literature as evidence of past events.Mythological
The old dream books have very little that is useful here, and what they do have is omen material about enemies and false friends. We would rather record the gap than supply a symbol to fill it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Artemidorus; Bulfinch).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.
In literature
Fiction about abuse fails most often through the aftermath rather than the event, because the aftermath is slow and undramatic and a plot wants neither. The books that hold up give the slowness its due.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
Structurally it is a story about who is believed, which is why it so often becomes a courtroom or a family kitchen rather than a confrontation.
Genre conventions
Literary fiction tends to withhold the scene and write around it. Genre fiction tends to stage it, which is a decision with consequences for who can read the book.
How to subvert it
Write the person who was not harmed and cannot stop talking about it, and let the one who was say almost nothing.
Try this
Write six hundred words of a family meal three years after. Nobody refers to it once.
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.