Las Vegas in a dream: what does it mean?
The city turns up in dreams mostly as a set of ideas about luck and consequence, and dreamers who have never been report it as readily as those who have.
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 enjoy a city organised entirely around permitted excess, and would ask what the dreamer thinks may only be done somewhere else.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would treat it as a place where the ordinary rules are suspended by agreement, which is close to the function of a festival, and would ask what the dreamer wanted suspended.
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?
Under the continuity view this is a media landscape rather than a lived one, assembled from films and photographs, which is why the dream version is usually the strip at night and nothing else. Dream settings built from screens tend to be strikingly incomplete in exactly that way.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Cities of licensed misrule have a long history, and so does the idea that what happens in one does not count. The bargain is old and it has never entirely worked.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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?
Writing the place is hard because it has already written itself, and a novelist arriving with a fresh eye finds the eye has been anticipated. The interesting recent work is about the people who live there and do not gamble.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It supplies a location where a character can do something out of character and it will still be plausible.
What are the genre conventions?
Crime fiction uses the money. Literary fiction uses the desert around it, which is usually the better half.
How to subvert it
Write it at nine in the morning, from the point of view of somebody going to work.
Try this
Write four hundred words of a hotel corridor with a cleaning trolley in it.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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