Matinee in a dream: what does it mean?
The afternoon performance, named with the word for morning, which nobody has ever corrected.
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 wrong hour. Something belonging to the evening is done in daylight, and he would ask what the dreamer is doing at the wrong time of day.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the audience it gets. Afternoon crowds are made of people whose evenings are not free, so a different half of a town sees the same play.
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?
Times of day and being in the wrong place at the wrong time appear in dream reports, and the neurocognitive account treats such displacement as ordinary in dreams.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Matin is morning, and the word slid through French from a morning entertainment to any daytime one, so the name records a schedule nobody keeps any more.
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?
You come out and it is still light. Everybody looks slightly embarrassed on the pavement, as though caught at something.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An evening thing done in daylight.
What are the genre conventions?
Two o'clock, a half-full house, and sunshine in the foyer afterwards.
How to subvert it
Write the matinee that starts at midnight.
Try this
Two hundred words about coming out of a theatre into daylight.
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.