Ejaculation in a dream: what does it mean?
A dream involving a bodily event that can genuinely occur during sleep is unusual, and the plain physical explanation is well documented and worth stating first.
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.
Freud
Freud treated this as among the clearest evidence for his account, since here a dream produces a real bodily outcome. Whatever one makes of the theory, the phenomenon he was pointing at is real and measurable.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung the involuntary release can image something the waking self does not permit, and he would attend to the dream's content around it rather than to the event.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
The plain reading first. Nocturnal emission is a normal physiological event, common in adolescence and occurring throughout life in many people, and it requires no explanation or concern. Sexual arousal during REM sleep is routine and largely independent of dream content, which is a well-established finding.
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.Mythological
Traditions have attached a great deal of shame and a certain amount of ritual purification to this, most of it built on a misunderstanding of what the body does at night. It is recorded as history rather than as anything to act on.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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.
In literature
Adolescent embarrassment about the body is a well-worked subject and this specific one is nearly always played for comedy, which is a thin treatment of something that causes real private distress.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It supplies involuntary bodily fact colliding with social shame, which is a strong and uncomfortable combination. Structurally it belongs in coming-of-age writing and is mostly avoided elsewhere.
Genre conventions
Coming-of-age uses the sheets. Comedy uses the discovery. Literary fiction largely avoids it, which leaves the honest version almost unwritten.
How to subvert it
Write a parent handling this with complete matter-of-factness and no embarrassment on either side.
Try this
Write a fourteen-year-old dealing with laundry at six in the morning. Four hundred words. Nobody else appears.
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.