Coroner in a dream: what does it mean?
The official whose job is to establish how somebody died, working for the record rather than for the family.
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 requirement of an account. A death that must be explained on paper before it can be closed makes the explanation a formality with real weight, and he would ask what the dreamer needed put in writing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might treat the inquest as a ritual of completion conducted in a bureaucratic register. It performs the same function as older rites and denies that it is doing so.
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 others dying are more frequently reported than dreams of one's own death, and content analysis finds the dreamer usually witnesses rather than experiences it. Official and institutional settings appear alongside.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The office is one of the oldest in English law, created in 1194 to protect the Crown's financial interest in deaths rather than to comfort anyone. Its purpose has changed and its independence dates from that origin.
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?
The office was invented to protect royal revenue. Its independence today is an accident of a medieval tax motive.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The account that has to be written before anything can close.
What are the genre conventions?
A file, a hearing, and a family in the third row.
How to subvert it
Write the finding being correct and useless.
Try this
Two hundred words about a death being explained accurately to people who needed something else.
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.