Codicil in a dream: what does it mean?
An addition to a will, which alters it without replacing it, so the original and the change have to be read together.
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 amendment surviving separately. A change kept as its own document rather than folded into the original leaves both visible, and he would ask what the dreamer had altered without rewriting.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the two can conflict. A codicil that contradicts the will has to be reconciled by somebody else, and the person who wrote both is not available to say what they meant.
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?
Documents appear in dream reports, and the neurocognitive account notes text is characteristically unstable in dreams and frequently refuses to resolve when examined.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
A codicil must be executed with the same formality as the will itself, so an afterthought scribbled and unwitnessed does nothing however clear the intention was.
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?
An unwitnessed afterthought does nothing, however plain the intention. The formality is the whole of it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A change kept beside the thing it changes.
What are the genre conventions?
A single added page, signed later, in a different hand.
How to subvert it
Write the two contradicting.
Try this
Two hundred words about an amendment that has to be read alongside the thing it amends, forever.
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.