Sideburns in a dream: what does it mean?
Hair grown down in front of the ears, named after a general whose name was Burnside and got turned around.
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 naming after a person. A style carries somebody's surname for a century and a half, and he would ask what the dreamer would be remembered by.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the reversal in the word. The name was swapped end for end and nobody has ever swapped it back, so the general is remembered inside out.
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?
Faces and appearance appear in dream reports, and content analysis records characters and their features among the most consistently present elements.
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?
The style was called burnsides after the American general Ambrose Burnside and the halves of the word were later transposed to give the modern form.
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?
The general was called Burnside. Somebody swapped the halves of his name round and that is what everybody has said ever since.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A person remembered inside out.
What are the genre conventions?
Whiskers coming down past the ear and stopping level with the mouth.
How to subvert it
Write the sideburns named after nobody.
Try this
Two hundred words about a name that got turned round.
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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