Eviction in a dream: what does it mean?
Being made to leave a place you live, by a process that is legal, orderly and entirely unlike how anybody experiences it.
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 paperwork. The most violent thing that can happen to a household arrives as a letter, and he would ask what the dreamer received calmly and could not absorb.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the reversal of the door. A door normally keeps the world out for you, and in an eviction it is the instrument used against you, which no other object manages.
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?
Loss of home and being unable to get back somewhere recur in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature lists being lost or shut out among 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?
Evincere is to conquer or overcome, so the word carries a defeat in it that the process is careful never to mention.
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 most violent thing that can happen to a household arrives through the letterbox, in the second person, politely.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A door turned against the person it was protecting.
What are the genre conventions?
A notice, a date, and a calendar with nothing after it.
How to subvert it
Write the eviction that is a relief.
Try this
Two hundred words about a catastrophe delivered as correspondence.
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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