Red carpet in a dream: what does it mean?
The red carpet is reported from the wrong side, and dreamers frequently say they were on it without knowing why.
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 being looked at, which he treated as a distinct dream anxiety, and would ask whether the dreamer was dressed for it.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would treat it as the persona given a physical route, since the whole apparatus exists to be walked along in view, and would notice whether the dreamer hurried.
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?
Exposure dreams are among the most commonly reported types anywhere, and this is a concentrated modern version. Under the continuity view the imagery arrives entirely through media, which is why the dream is usually assembled from photographs rather than from any experience.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235. The reading also uses the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972).What do myth and folklore say?
Laying down cloth for someone to walk on is an old gesture of honour with a documented history in ceremony and in drama, and it carried a note of dangerous presumption long before it carried publicity.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; Frazer).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?
Celebrity as a subject dates faster than almost anything, and the books that survive are the ones about the machinery rather than about the famous. The apparatus around it is also enormous and entirely invisible in the photographs, which is where the interesting book is: the barriers, the lighting rig, the publicists, and the two hours of waiting.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It stages arrival as a performance, which makes it a very efficient way to show somebody being consumed.
What are the genre conventions?
Satire uses the shouting. Literary fiction uses the person holding the coats.
How to subvert it
Write it from a driver waiting three hours in a line of cars.
Try this
Write three hundred words of the same stretch of pavement the next morning.
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.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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.