Bus driver in a dream: what does it mean?
Somebody responsible for fifty strangers who will never learn their name, on a route they could drive with their eyes shut and must not.
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 control handed over completely, since a passenger has no steering, no brake and no say in the route, and has agreed to all of that for the price of a ticket.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the driver as whatever part of a person is currently deciding the direction, and would find it significant if the dreamer could not see who was at the wheel.
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 a vehicle with nobody driving, or with the dreamer in a back seat unable to reach the controls, are widely reported and belong with the loss-of-control family rather than with any comment on transport.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., The typical dreams of Canadian university students (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Drivers on regular routes come to know their passengers by sight and journey rather than by name, and will hold a bus for somebody they recognise running. It is one of the last routine relationships between strangers that operates entirely on recognition. Drivers on rural routes will carry a parcel for somebody and think nothing of it.
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?
Holding the bus for somebody they recognise is the whole character in one action, and it costs a sentence.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The one steering, whom nobody is looking at.
What are the genre conventions?
Faceless, in a mirror, or refusing to stop.
How to subvert it
Write the last route of the night, and the two passengers left.
Try this
Two hundred words from somebody who recognises fifty people who do not know them.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.