Stocking in a dream: what does it mean?
A close-fitting leg covering that was ordinary for both sexes for centuries, became women's wear, and then became a shortage worth queueing for.
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 garment that has been differently charged in different decades, and would be more interested in when the dreamer's version comes from than in what it is.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the Christmas stocking as an entirely separate object that shares a name, and would ask which one the dream was using, since one is intimate and the other is for children.
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 ladder running up a stocking is a small precise disaster and a common anxiety image, because it cannot be stopped once it starts and is visible to everybody. That combination is what makes it work in dreams.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Nylon stockings vanished from shops during the Second World War because the material went into parachutes, and women drew a seam up the back of bare legs with eyebrow pencil. A shortage produced a cosmetic practice that outlasted it. Gravy browning was used on the legs first, and the seam was drawn on top.
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 drawn-on seam is the detail: a straight line up the back of a leg, done by a friend because you cannot do your own.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The ordinary thing that scarcity made significant.
What are the genre conventions?
Hung by a fire, or rolled down in a scene meant to be provocative.
How to subvert it
Write two women in a kitchen drawing seams on each other, laughing.
Try this
Two hundred words about improvising something that is not available.
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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