Clothesline in a dream: what does it mean?
A rope strung across a yard for drying, which is the only piece of domestic equipment that depends entirely on the weather and is used anyway.
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 public display. A household's clothes are hung where the neighbours can see, and he would ask what the dreamer puts out where it can be read.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the judgement in it. Neighbours are widely understood to assess a wash by its whiteness and its order on the line, so the yard is a small competition.
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?
Weather and outdoor domestic activity appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such settings among ordinary reported dream content.
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?
Line-dried washing smells different from tumble-dried, and the cause is generally attributed to sunlight acting on the fibres rather than to the wind.
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 neighbours can see it. Everybody hanging out a wash knows the neighbours can see it, and the order things go on the line is not accidental.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A household's business, hung up in public.
What are the genre conventions?
White sheets snapping, and a line of pegs in size order.
How to subvert it
Write the clothesline nobody can see.
Try this
Two hundred words about a private thing hung where it is read.
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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