Bigamy in a dream: what does it mean?
Being married to two people at once is a specific dream predicament, and the reported feeling is usually administrative panic rather than guilt.
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 doubling, since a dream that gives the dreamer two of a thing that is supposed to be singular has arranged a conflict that cannot be resolved by choosing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
For Jung the double commitment can image two incompatible allegiances in a life, and marriage is simply the most legible container the psyche had available for that.
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?
Under the continuity view this follows waking situations of divided loyalty, from work to family, far more often than anything about actual relationships. The setting is borrowed to express the structure.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Marriage law has varied enormously and plural marriage is or has been lawful in a great many societies, so the offence here is legal and local rather than universal, which is worth stating.
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?
Bigamy plots are a Victorian obsession and they work because they combine a secret, a legal jeopardy and a domestic betrayal in one fact. The Victorian appetite for these plots was partly legal: divorce was effectively unavailable to most people until 1857, so bigamy was the working-class solution and the novelists knew it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It supplies a secret with a deadline built in, since discovery is only a question of time. Structurally it generates its own third act.
What are the genre conventions?
Sensation fiction uses the discovery. Literary fiction uses the two households, which is where the real material is. Comedy uses the near-miss. Social history uses the desertion, which is what most of these cases actually were rather than romance.
How to subvert it
Write both spouses meeting and getting on extremely well, before either knows.
Try this
Write somebody maintaining two households for a week. Only the logistics and the lying.
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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