Nazi in a dream: what does it mean?
Dreaming this imagery is common, means nothing about the dreamer's politics, and is reported more often by people whose families lived through it.
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.
Freud
Freud fled Vienna in 1938 and his sisters did not survive. Any reading of this material that treats it as ordinary dream symbolism is missing something, and his own life is the plainest available argument against doing so.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung's conduct and writing in the 1930s are a serious and unresolved charge against him, and we are not going to use his framework here as though that were not the case. A reader who wants the Jungian reading should know that context first.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Under the continuity view this arrives overwhelmingly through film, school and history, which is why the dream version is usually cinematic. Where there is family history, trauma-dream research finds material transmitted across generations in the form of dreams and fears, which is documented and does not require the dreamer to have been told anything explicit.
Our summary of trauma-dream research. See Barrett, ed., Trauma and Dreams (1996). Dream content is not treated in that literature as evidence of past events. The reading also uses the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972).Mythological
The regime deliberately took older symbols and reworked them, which is why some of the imagery has a long innocent history and a short unusable one. Recovering the older meaning is a real scholarly problem and not a way of excusing anything.
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.
In literature
The subject has produced great literature and an enormous amount of bad, and the reliable warning sign is a book that finds the imagery interesting rather than the people.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It supplies an absolute against which any character can be measured, which is exactly why it should be used sparingly.
Genre conventions
Historical fiction reconstructs. Testimony refuses to. The third mode, using it as shorthand for evil in an unrelated plot, is the one to avoid.
How to subvert it
Write a bureaucrat doing paperwork correctly and going home to a family they love.
Try this
Write four hundred words of an ordinary street on an ordinary morning, in 1937.
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.