Waif in a dream: what does it mean?
A word that once meant an abandoned child and now mostly means a thin adult, which is a considerable demotion for a piece of vocabulary.
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 a figure who belongs to nobody, since the dream has produced a person with no claim on anybody present and no one with a claim on them.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the abandoned child as one of the tradition's standing figures and would ask whether the dreamer helped, passed, or was the child.
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?
The fashion sense of the word, meaning fragile and very thin, arrived in the 1990s and now dominates, which means the same word carries destitution and glamour depending on who is speaking. Worth knowing which sense a dreamer has reached for.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
In English law a waif was originally property, specifically goods thrown away by a fleeing thief, which the lord of the manor could claim. The word arrived at abandoned children by way of abandoned objects, and it never entirely lost the sense of something unclaimed. Waif and stray were a legal pair long before they were a charitable one.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after 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?
The legal origin is the material and it is bleak: a child described with the same word the law used for dropped goods nobody had come back for.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The unclaimed.
What are the genre conventions?
Large eyes, a doorway, and snow, in something Victorian.
How to subvert it
Write the child as competent, organised and running something.
Try this
Two hundred words about somebody nobody has come back for. They have stopped watching the door. Somebody new arrives and they do not look up.
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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