Quickening in a dream: what does it mean?
The first felt movement of a child before birth, which was for centuries the moment a pregnancy was held to be certain.
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 privacy of the evidence. Only one person can feel it and nobody else can check, and he would ask what the dreamer knows that cannot be shown to anybody.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the word itself. Quick meant alive, as in the quick and the dead, so quickening is simply the coming alive and says exactly what people thought was happening.
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?
Bodily sensation and inner states appear in dream reports, and the continuity view treats waking physical experience as tracking into dream content.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Before any reliable test existed, this was the point at which a pregnancy was treated as established, in law as well as in ordinary life.
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?
Quick meant alive. The word is not about speed at all, and it says plainly what people believed was happening at that moment.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Evidence only one person can have.
What are the genre conventions?
A hand stopping halfway through something, and a face not saying anything yet.
How to subvert it
Write the quickening somebody else can feel.
Try this
Two hundred words about knowing something nobody can check.
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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