Hermit in a dream: what does it mean?
Somebody who withdrew on purpose, in a role that societies have variously treated as holy, useful, suspicious and mad.
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 difference between withdrawal chosen and isolation suffered, since the same circumstances feel entirely different depending on which it is.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would find the hermit a standing figure and would ask what the dreamer thought they had gone away to do, since the tradition treats it as work rather than absence.
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?
Solitude and loneliness are not the same and are increasingly studied separately, since chosen solitude is not associated with the health effects that involuntary isolation is. Which one a person is in makes a measurable difference.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Eighteenth-century English landowners built hermitages in their grounds and advertised for ornamental hermits to live in them, with contracts specifying that the occupant must not cut his hair or speak to visitors. Several such advertisements survive. One offered seven hundred pounds for seven years, which was a fortune. Nobody is recorded as having lasted the term.
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?
Employing a hermit, by contract, with clauses about hair length, is real and is one of the strangest things the English gentry ever did.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The withdrawal that is work rather than absence. Chosen, and defended, and paid for by somebody.
What are the genre conventions?
A cave, a beard, and a single line of wisdom. Delivered to somebody who came a long way for it.
How to subvert it
Write the ornamental hermit, and the seven-year contract. Clause four is about the beard.
Try this
Two hundred words about being paid to be alone in somebody's garden. The contract runs seven years.
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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