Wig in a dream: what does it mean?
Hair belonging to somebody else, worn either to conceal something or to announce an office, and never for a neutral reason.
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 fear of it coming off, since a wig is the one garment whose failure exposes something the wearer was specifically hiding.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might separate the two uses sharply, since a wig worn to hide is doing the opposite work of a wig worn to be seen, and a court wig is meant to be noticed.
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?
Hair loss during illness or treatment is a real and often underestimated distress, and dreams about it are common in people going through it. The dream is usually the worry rather than a message about vanity.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
English barristers' wigs are horsehair and deliberately archaic, a fashion of the 1680s frozen into a uniform, and they were abolished in civil courts in 2007 while surviving in criminal ones. The argument for keeping them is anonymity and the argument against is that they frighten people. Children giving evidence were the group the reformers argued about most.
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 2007 split is useful: a profession that decided the costume helped in one kind of case and hurt in another, and kept both answers.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Somebody else's hair, worn on purpose.
What are the genre conventions?
Slipping at a bad moment, for comedy or humiliation.
How to subvert it
Write the fitting, and the person choosing a colour that is not their old one.
Try this
Two hundred words about choosing how to look after an illness. The fitter is kind and the choice is still awful.
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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