Retreat in a dream: what does it mean?
Going backwards on purpose, which is the hardest manoeuvre there is and the one least likely to be forgiven.
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 shame attached to a good decision. Withdrawing early saves more people than anything else and is remembered as failure, and he would ask what sensible thing the dreamer could not be seen to do.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the second meaning. A retreat is also a place people go to think, so one word covers a rout and a monastery, and both are a deliberate stepping back.
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?
Escape and withdrawal appear in dream reports, and threat-simulation treats such rehearsal as its central claim, though the theory is contested.
Our summary of threat-simulation theory. See Revonsuo, 'The reinterpretation of dreams: an evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23(6), 2000, 877-901. The theory is contested.What do myth and folklore say?
An orderly withdrawal under fire is held to be the most difficult operation an army performs, and it is almost never what gets a statue.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
One word covers a rout and a monastery, and both of them are a deliberate stepping back from something.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The right decision that cannot be seen to be one.
What are the genre conventions?
A column moving the way it came, in order.
How to subvert it
Write the retreat as the victory.
Try this
Two hundred words about the hardest thing an army does.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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