Divination in a dream: what does it mean?
Any attempt to find something out by a method that does not investigate, which is a very large family of practices with one shape.
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 question behind the question. Somebody wants an answer badly enough to accept it from cards, and he would ask what the dreamer needs told.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note what the method supplies. A random arrangement gives something to talk about, and a great deal of the value is in being asked what you think it means.
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?
Uncertainty about the future appears in dream reports, and the continuity view treats waking preoccupations as tracking into dream content.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
The word is built on divinus, of a god, so the whole family of practices is named for the assumption that the answer comes from outside the person asking.
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?
The cards do not answer. Somebody asks what you make of them, and you find you already had an opinion you had not said out loud.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An answer that turns out to have been yours.
What are the genre conventions?
A spread on a table, and a long pause before anybody speaks.
How to subvert it
Write the divination that tells you nothing you knew.
Try this
Two hundred words about needing to be asked before you can say it.
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.
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.