Regiment in a dream: what does it mean?
A permanent body of soldiers with a name, a history and a place it recruits from, which makes it an institution rather than a unit.
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 continuity. It outlives everybody in it and keeps their record, and he would ask what the dreamer belongs to that will go on without them.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the geography. Recruiting from one area meant a bad day could take the young men of a single town, which is why some war memorials are so long.
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?
Belonging and groups appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such social content among frequent reported dream material.
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?
Amalgamations of regiments have repeatedly caused more public feeling than the reorganisations that produced them expected, because the name and the county are attached to each other.
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?
It recruited from one place. That meant one afternoon could take the young men of a single town, and the memorial in the square says so.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Something that outlives everybody in it.
What are the genre conventions?
A cap badge that has been the same for two hundred years, on a new man.
How to subvert it
Write the regiment with no history.
Try this
Two hundred words about belonging to something that continues without you.
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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