Wardrobe in a dream: what does it mean?
A cupboard tall enough to stand in, which is the whole reason it appears in so many stories about going somewhere else.
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 hiding in one, since a child's hiding place that an adult still remembers is a specific and durable kind of memory.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a container of the clothes a person appears in as an inventory of presentations, and would ask what was at the back of it.
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?
Clearing a dead relative's wardrobe is a very widely shared experience and turns up in dreams for years afterwards, usually with the smell of it intact. It is one of the strongest reported sensory details in grief 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?
The word originally named the room where a household's clothes and valuables were kept and the department that ran it, and the King's Wardrobe was a serious office of state with its own building and accounts. It shrank from an institution to a piece of furniture. The building it occupied in London gave its name to a street that is still there.
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 back of it is the whole device and it works because of a real property: a wardrobe is deeper than it looks and the far corner is genuinely dark.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The container you can stand inside.
What are the genre conventions?
Pushed through, into somewhere else.
How to subvert it
Write the clearing out, and the bin bags, and the one thing kept.
Try this
Two hundred words about emptying somebody's clothes. One coat still holds the shape of the shoulders.
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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