Retirement in a dream: what does it mean?
Stopping work for good, which removes a great deal that was never described as part of the job and turns out to have been most of it.
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 what goes with the work. The structure of a day, a reason to leave the house and most of a person's company all end at once, and he would ask what the dreamer would lose besides the task.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the question everybody is asked. What do you do is answered in the past tense afterwards, so the ordinary opening of a conversation becomes a small problem.
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?
Work and its ending appear in dream reports, and the continuity view treats waking occupations 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?
The word originally meant withdrawing, as an army retires from a position, so the sense of retreat is in it before any sense of rest is.
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?
The job was also a timetable, a reason to be somewhere and about forty people. All of those stop on the same afternoon.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Losing a great deal that was never in the job description.
What are the genre conventions?
A card signed by everybody, and a Monday with nothing in it.
How to subvert it
Write the retirement that changes only the work.
Try this
Two hundred words about what ends alongside a job.
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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