Vale in a dream: what does it mean?
A broad valley, and a word that survives mostly in place names and in one very old phrase about the world.
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 phrase. Describing the whole world as a vale of tears sets a valley against somewhere higher and better, and he would ask what the dreamer was treating as temporary.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that a vale is sheltered and enclosed at once. It is the safest ground and the ground you cannot see out of, and the tradition uses both readings freely.
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?
Landscape settings appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds familiar local terrain persisting in dream series long after a person has moved.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
The vale of tears is a very old formula for the world as a place passed through, and the word for a soft green valley was chosen to carry it.
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?
Somebody chose the gentlest possible landscape word to describe the world as a place of suffering. That is a deliberate choice.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The safe place you cannot see out of.
What are the genre conventions?
Soft green ground, a river in the bottom, and hills on both sides.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who never leaves it and is right not to.
Try this
Two hundred words about somewhere sheltered that is also somewhere you cannot see beyond.
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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