Turning your back in a dream: what does it mean?
Ending an exchange by removing your face from it, which is the most complete refusal available without a word.
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 it leaves. The other person is still talking to a back, and he would ask who the dreamer had stopped being available to.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the trust in it. Turning your back is also what you do when you are certain nothing is coming, so the same act is contempt in one room and safety in another.
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?
Rejection and abandonment appear in dream reports, and content analysis records social misfortune as more common than social good fortune.
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?
Never turning your back on the sea, on the altar, on a bull or on an enemy are all the same instruction, given by people who had learned it the hard way.
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?
It is contempt in one room and complete trust in another, because both mean you are certain nothing is coming.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A refusal that needs no words and cannot be answered.
What are the genre conventions?
Somebody still talking, to a shoulder.
How to subvert it
Write the turned back as an apology.
Try this
Two hundred words about ending a conversation by removing your face.
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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