Excess in a dream: what does it mean?
The first part of any claim, which you pay yourself, and which exists to stop you claiming for small things.
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 deterrent in it. The arrangement is designed to make you not use it, and he would ask what protection the dreamer had that discouraged being called on.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the calculation it forces. A person with a small loss has to work out whether claiming will cost them more later, so the insured are made into actuaries.
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?
Weighing options and reluctance appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records indecision among ordinary situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
A higher one buys a lower premium, so the customer is offered the chance to carry more of their own risk for a discount.
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?
A person with a small loss has to calculate whether claiming will cost them more later, which turns the insured into actuaries.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Protection designed to discourage being used.
What are the genre conventions?
A figure on a policy, checked after the accident.
How to subvert it
Write the excess as nothing.
Try this
Two hundred words about cover arranged to be inconvenient.
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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