Anticipation in a dream: what does it mean?
The state before a thing arrives, which is frequently stronger than the thing and is over the moment it turns up.
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 pleasure being in the interval. A wish that is more enjoyable unfulfilled than satisfied has an interest in the delay, and he would ask what the dreamer was in no hurry to receive.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that anticipation constructs the thing in advance. What arrives has to compete with a version the person built themselves and had complete control over.
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?
Dreams of waiting, of imminent events and of things about to happen appear in dream reports, and content analysis finds apprehension among the most commonly recorded emotions.
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?
Advent and the days before a feast were structured as a season in their own right, so the waiting was given a shape and observances rather than being merely endured.
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?
The waiting was made into a season with its own rules, because somebody understood it was the better part.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The version you built yourself, which the real one has to beat.
What are the genre conventions?
A cleared afternoon, a listened-for car, and nothing yet.
How to subvert it
Write the arrival being better.
Try this
Two hundred words about a wait that is more enjoyable than whatever ends it.
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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