Rape in a dream: what does it mean?
Dreams of assault are reported by people who have been assaulted and by people who have not, and the dream on its own tells you nothing about which of those you are.
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's account of dreams as disguised wishes has been used to say appalling things about this material, and it should be said plainly that a dream does not indicate a wish here. He was inconsistent about how far dreams reflect real events, and this is a place where that inconsistency matters.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would attend to power and violation as material rather than as a report, and would take great care not to make the dream the dreamer's responsibility. Any reading that arrives at the dreamer's fault has gone wrong.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Replaying and near-replaying dreams are documented in people with a history of assault, and they tend to change as waking distress changes, which is one of the reasons treatment helps. That is a group pattern and it does not run backwards: a dream cannot establish that something happened, and it is not a wish, a prediction or a diagnosis. If these dreams are frequent, or you wake frightened, a doctor or a support line is the right place. Not a dictionary.
Our summary of trauma-dream research. See Barrett, ed., Trauma and Dreams (1996). Dream content is not treated in that literature as evidence of past events.Mythological
Older dream books treat this material as omen, and the omens they offer are worthless and occasionally cruel. We would rather record that they are useless than reproduce them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Artemidorus).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
Fiction about assault fails most often by making the event the subject, when the survivors who write about it are nearly always writing about the years afterwards and about who believed them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
Structurally it is a story about testimony, which is why it so often becomes a story about institutions.
Genre conventions
Literary fiction increasingly withholds the scene, and the shift over the last forty years is visible and deliberate.
How to subvert it
Write the friend who responded badly and knows it, three years later.
Try this
Write six hundred words of an ordinary afternoon in which somebody decides not to say anything.
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.