U-turn in a dream: what does it mean?
The U-turn is reported as being made on a road where it is not allowed, and dreamers frequently report the decision rather than the manoeuvre.
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 reversal as a decision rather than a movement, since the dream has arranged for the dreamer to change their mind in public.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would notice that a return is not the same as a failure, which he was fairly insistent about, and would ask what the dreamer is going back for.
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?
Under the continuity view driving dreams track driving, and the specific anxiety of an illegal or awkward manoeuvre is ordinary residue. Dreamed movement is generated without the usual bodily feedback, which is why the geometry in these dreams is often impossible and untroubling.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018). The reading also uses the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972).What do myth and folklore say?
There is no tradition for the object, which requires a road system. What the traditions do carry is the strong and widespread rule against turning back on certain journeys, which is much older and much more serious.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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 reversal is a plot move rather than an image, and its difficulty is that a character who changes their mind convincingly is harder to write than one who does not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is a public admission of a wrong direction, which most people would rather drive four miles than make.
What are the genre conventions?
Road fiction uses the moment. Political writing has taken the phrase and worn it out entirely.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who does it immediately, without embarrassment, and is right.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a car stopped at a gateway.
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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