Deserter in a dream: what does it mean?
Somebody who left, which is a crime in every army and is very often the only reasonable thing anybody did.
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 two readings of one act. Cowardice or sanity, and nothing in the act distinguishes them, and he would ask what the dreamer walked away from.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the pardons. Men shot for desertion have been formally pardoned a century later, which is an admission that the condition was not understood at the time.
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?
Flight and escape recur in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records fleeing among the common themes.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Shell shock was not recognised when the earliest executions took place, so a great many of those men were being punished for an injury.
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?
Men shot for it have been pardoned a century later, which is an admission that the thing was not understood at the time.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
One act read as cowardice or as sanity, with nothing to tell them apart.
What are the genre conventions?
An empty place in a line at roll call.
How to subvert it
Write the deserter as the brave one.
Try this
Two hundred words about walking away being a crime.
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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