Apostrophe in a dream: what does it mean?
A mark that stands for something taken out, and the one most people get wrong, which is unusual for a character with only two jobs.
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 what it marks. Its whole function is to point at an absence, and he would ask what gap in the dreamer's account has been given a sign of its own.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the strength of feeling about it. People who could not name another mark will correct this one in public, so it carries far more social weight than its work justifies.
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?
Errors and being corrected appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records public embarrassment among the most 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?
The Greek word means a turning away, and the mark arrived in English through French printers who used it for elided vowels, which is still one of its two uses.
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?
It marks a hole. People who cannot name any other mark on the page will stop in the street to tell you that you have put this one in the wrong place.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A sign standing in for what was removed.
What are the genre conventions?
A hand-lettered sign outside a shop, and somebody photographing it.
How to subvert it
Write the apostrophe that adds something.
Try this
Two hundred words about a mark that stands for an absence.
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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