Promise in a dream: what does it mean?
A claim on your own future self, made by somebody who will not be the one keeping 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.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the two people involved, who are the same person. The one who promises is not the one who has to do it, and he would ask what the dreamer had committed a later self to.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it needs no object. Nothing changes hands, nothing is signed, and the whole thing rests on a sentence and the expectation that sentences hold.
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?
Obligation and failing to meet it recur in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature lists being unprepared among the most commonly reported situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Promises are like piecrust, made to be broken, which is a proverb old enough that the pastry it describes is no longer the kind anybody makes.
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?
The person who makes it and the person who has to keep it are the same person at different times, and they rarely agree.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A demand made of a self who is not there to object.
What are the genre conventions?
A hand shaken, and a date some distance off.
How to subvert it
Write the promise kept by accident.
Try this
Two hundred words about committing somebody who cannot answer back.
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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