Averted eyes in a dream: what does it mean?
Looking away from somebody, which is respect in some rooms and guilt in others, and the same movement in both.
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 reading. Not meeting a gaze is taken as evasion in one culture and as courtesy in another, and he would ask which one the dreamer was being judged by.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that everybody does it. Sustained eye contact is difficult for almost everyone, and looking away is the ordinary rhythm of a conversation rather than a signal.
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?
Being judged and evaluated recurs in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records examination and scrutiny among the 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?
Lowering the eyes before a superior is required in more than one court etiquette, and looking a king in the face has been an offence in several.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
In one room it is respect and in the next it is guilt, and it is the same movement performed by the same person.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
One gesture reading as opposite things in different rooms.
What are the genre conventions?
A gaze going down, and staying there.
How to subvert it
Write averted eyes as the boldest thing in the room.
Try this
Two hundred words about being judged by a rule you were not raised on.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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