Motive in a dream: what does it mean?
The why, which juries want, stories require, and the law needs a great deal less than anybody expects.
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 appetite for it. People cannot accept an act without a reason and will supply one, and he would ask what the dreamer needed to make sense of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the legal position. Intent must be proved and motive need not be, so the thing everybody wants is not the thing the case turns on.
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?
Explanation and the search for meaning appear in dream reports, and the neurocognitive account treats the sense that events must have a reason as supplied rather than found.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Every detective story turns on it and most prosecutions do not, which is the widest gap between the fiction and the practice in the whole subject.
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?
Intent has to be proved and motive does not, so the thing everybody wants is not the thing the case turns on.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A reason demanded by everybody except the law.
What are the genre conventions?
A question asked in a corridor: but why would he.
How to subvert it
Write the crime with no motive at all.
Try this
Two hundred words about needing a reason more than the court does.
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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