Orgy in a dream: what does it mean?
A word that has drifted a long way from what it originally described, which was a religious rite rather than a party.
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 would attend to the crowd rather than the sex, since a dream that removes the usual restrictions for everybody at once is doing something different from one about a single person.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading might take the dissolving of individual boundaries in a group as the material, and would note that this is what the word originally described in a religious rather than a sexual sense.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Sexual dreams involving multiple people are commonly reported and cause disproportionate distress on waking, particularly to people in relationships. A dream is not a wish, a confession or a plan, and dreaming something says nothing about what you want or would do.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., The typical dreams of Canadian university students (2003).Mythological
The Greek orgia were secret rites of Dionysus and Demeter, and the word meant the ceremony rather than anything that happened in it. What the rites actually involved was concealed by initiates who kept the secret successfully enough that nobody now knows. The Eleusinian mysteries ran for roughly two thousand years and nobody broke it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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 mysteries being kept so well that they are genuinely lost is the more interesting subject, and it undercuts every lurid reconstruction ever written.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
The rite that became a rumour.
Genre conventions
Decadence, in a scene establishing a corrupt court.
How to subvert it
Write the initiates keeping the secret for two thousand years, successfully.
Try this
Two hundred words about a secret that was actually kept.
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.