Patience in a dream: what does it mean?
Waiting without the waiting becoming the whole of your attention, which is the part that makes it a skill rather than a delay.
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 what the wait is protecting. Patience defers a demand rather than dropping it, and he would ask what the dreamer was still expecting and had agreed not to ask about yet.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that patience requires believing something is coming. Where that belief goes, the same behaviour becomes resignation, and the two are indistinguishable from outside.
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?
Waiting and delay appear in dream reports, and content analysis finds obstruction and postponement among the recurring frustrations described. The dreamer prevented from proceeding is a common shape.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The word shares a root with passion and with suffering, from patior, to undergo. What English now treats as a mild virtue began as a word for bearing something done to you.
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?
Patience and passion are the same root, and it meant suffering. The virtue was originally just endurance with better manners.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Waiting without it becoming everything.
What are the genre conventions?
A queue, a long afternoon, and no visible progress.
How to subvert it
Write patience and resignation being indistinguishable to everyone including the person.
Try this
Two hundred words about someone waiting well, where nobody can tell whether they have given up.
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.
-
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.
-
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.