Quarantine in a dream: what does it mean?
Isolation for a fixed period, named after forty days, which is the number Venice settled on for arriving ships.
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 number being in the name. A period fixed at forty and then carried into every language records one city's decision permanently, and he would ask what arbitrary figure the dreamer still worked 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 is about time rather than treatment. Nothing is done during it, so the whole method is waiting long enough to find out.
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?
Isolation and confinement appear in dream reports, and content analysis finds restricted movement and separation among the recurring situations described.
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?
Ragusa used thirty days and Venice moved to forty, and quaranta giorni gave the word, so every language carries a Venetian administrative choice inside the term.
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?
Ragusa used thirty days and Venice made it forty. Every language now carries one city's administrative decision inside the word.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A method that consists entirely of waiting to find out.
What are the genre conventions?
A ship anchored offshore, in sight of a city it may not enter.
How to subvert it
Write the thirty days.
Try this
Two hundred words about a number chosen once by somebody, and kept by everybody since.
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.