Currier in a dream: what does it mean?
The trade that finishes leather after the tanner has preserved it, working it soft and level so that it can actually be used.
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 second trade. One craft makes the material last and another makes it usable, and he would ask who finished what the dreamer only preserved.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the strictness of the division. Tanners and curriers were separate trades with separate companies, and the boundary between them was regulated and argued over.
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?
Work and trades appear in dream reports, and the continuity view treats waking occupations as tracking into dream content.
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?
Currying a horse and currying leather are the same word, from a root meaning to make ready, and currying favour comes from an entirely separate and much stranger route.
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?
Currying a horse and currying leather are one word. Currying favour comes from somewhere else entirely and involves a horse called Fauvel in a French poem.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The second trade that makes the first one useful.
What are the genre conventions?
A hide over a bench, being worked with a slicker until it lies flat.
How to subvert it
Write the currier who tans.
Try this
Two hundred words about one craft finishing another's work.
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.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.