Chess in a dream: what does it mean?
A game where the most powerful piece is the queen and the whole thing ends when the king cannot move, which nobody designed as a comment and which reads as one anyway.
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 go directly to the family on the board. A king who can barely move, a queen who can do anything, and a row of pieces spent to protect them is a domestic arrangement as much as a game.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the two colours moving alternately on one board as a picture of opposed forces that require each other to exist, and would ask which side the dreamer was playing.
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?
Players dream about positions, and the dreams frequently misbehave: pieces that will not move, a board that changes size, a clock running that was not there before. Skilled activity is typically degraded rather than enhanced in dreams.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
The queen was originally a weak adviser moving one square diagonally, and gained her modern powers in Europe in the late fifteenth century, at a period of powerful reigning queens. The change was dramatic enough that the new version was called mad queen's chess.
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?
Wildly overused as a metaphor for scheming, and almost nobody writes what a game actually feels like, which is long stretches of nothing followed by a mistake.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The contest where everything is visible and it does not help.
What are the genre conventions?
Two antagonists, alternating moves, and dialogue that names the pieces.
How to subvert it
Write a blunder. Good players lose to those far more often than to brilliance.
Try this
Two hundred words about somebody resigning a game they could still have drawn.
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.