Interval in a dream: what does it mean?
The gap between two parts of a thing, which is the only stretch of an evening the audience is trusted to arrange themselves.
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 what the gap is for. A pause built into an experience so that the experience can continue is a managed release, and he would ask what the dreamer needed a break inside rather than at the end of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the shift in the room. The lights come up and the people who were an audience become a crowd again, and twenty minutes later they agree to go back.
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?
Dreams are commonly reported as continuous even when the reported events are not, and the neurocognitive account treats narrative continuity as supplied rather than experienced.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
The theatre bar earns in the interval what the play cannot, which is why the interval survives every argument about shortening it.
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?
The lights come up and an audience turns back into a crowd for twenty minutes, then agrees to become an audience again.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A pause built in so the thing can carry on.
What are the genre conventions?
A house half empty, and a bell nobody is hurrying for.
How to subvert it
Write the interval that nobody comes back from.
Try this
Two hundred words about the part of an evening that is not the thing you came for.
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.