Rebate in a dream: what does it mean?
Money given back after it has been taken, so the payer is out of pocket first and refunded afterwards.
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 order of events. A discount that requires paying full price first and claiming later costs the payer the use of the money in between, and he would ask what the dreamer had lent without noticing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that many are never claimed. The system depends on a proportion of people not bothering, so the saving is real and the design assumes it will go unused.
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?
Money and transactions appear in dream reports, and continuity research finds financial content following waking circumstances rather than carrying meaning of its own.
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?
Rebattre is to beat back, and a rebate in carpentry is a groove cut back into an edge, so a refund and a rabbet joint come from the same idea of taking something down.
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?
A refund and a carpenter's rabbet joint are the same word, from beating something back. One reduces a price and the other reduces an edge.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A saving that depends on people forgetting to claim it.
What are the genre conventions?
A form to fill in later, a deadline, and a drawer it goes in.
How to subvert it
Write everybody claiming.
Try this
Two hundred words about a discount designed around the number of people who will not bother.
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.
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.