Revenge in a dream: what does it mean?
Revenge dreams are reported with unusual clarity, and dreamers frequently wake pleased and then uneasy about being pleased.
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 say the dream has staged something the waking mind declines to want, and would treat the satisfaction as the evidence rather than the plot. He would not treat it as an intention.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would attend to the shadow, since a revenge dream generally has the dreamer doing something they would not do, and would treat that as material to be known rather than acted on.
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?
Aggression appears in dream reports at rates that surprise people, and there is no association between violent dream content and violent waking behaviour. That is worth stating plainly for anyone unsettled by having enjoyed one of these.
Our summary of the norms in Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966). The norms are old and the samples were students.What do myth and folklore say?
The feud is a documented social institution in a great many places, with rules about proportion and about how it ends, and the rules exist because unregulated retaliation destroys communities.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Bulfinch).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 revenge plot is ancient and self-limiting, since it must either be completed, which ends the story, or refused, which is the more interesting book and a much harder one to write. The form also has a strong association with delay, since the interesting versions are nearly always about somebody who waited, and waiting is a great deal harder to write than striking.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It gives a character a goal that is entirely clear and entirely corrosive.
What are the genre conventions?
Genre fiction delivers it. Literary fiction interrupts it, usually with something mundane.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who gets it completely and feels nothing at all.
Try this
Write four hundred words of a person deciding not to send a message.
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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