Pheasant in a dream: what does it mean?
A bird released in millions to be shot at, which makes it one of the most numerous and least wild animals in the British countryside.
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 probably attend to a creature raised specifically to be killed and meanwhile allowed to wander freely, since the arrangement is strange enough to be worth a dreamer's attention.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take an animal that looks entirely wild and is not as a workable image of something a dreamer has mistaken for free.
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?
For most people in Britain and Ireland the commonest encounter is a dead one on a road, which is a specific and unlovely image that turns up in dreams more often than any shooting scene.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The bird is not native to Britain, having been introduced from Asia, probably by the Romans and certainly by the Normans, and it is now released in very large numbers each year for shooting. Its total mass at release is a significant share of all the birds in the country. Around forty million are released each year, which is more than the total breeding population of any native species.
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?
Neither wild nor tame is the useful position. A creature with no idea what it is for, wandering into roads, is a better image than any game bird in flight.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The thing that looks free and was released.
What are the genre conventions?
Broken from cover, in an autumn shooting scene.
How to subvert it
Write the rearing pens in July, and the man who feeds them.
Try this
Two hundred words about an animal that does not know what it is for.
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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