Excuse in a dream: what does it mean?
A reason offered after the event, which is the only time a reason is not a plan.
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 timing. The same sentence is a plan before and an excuse afterwards, and he would ask what the dreamer had decided first and explained second.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that a good one is worse. A weak excuse is forgiven quickly and a convincing one invites examination, so the effort put in works against the person making it.
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?
Failure and its aftermath recur in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records being unprepared among the most commonly described situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Ex causa is out of the cause, to free from the charge, so an excuse originally removed a case rather than explaining one away.
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 same sentence is a plan on Monday and an excuse on Friday, and only the order changed.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A reason arriving after the thing it explains.
What are the genre conventions?
Somebody talking a little too long about traffic.
How to subvert it
Write the excuse that is simply true.
Try this
Two hundred words about explaining backwards.
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.