Greed in a dream: what does it mean?
Wanting more than is needed, which requires a sense of enough to be measured against and produces none of its own.
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 absence of a stopping point. An appetite with no natural satisfaction is not really about the thing being accumulated, and he would ask what the dreamer was actually short of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that hoarding and generosity are both about a fear of not having. The two behaviours look opposite and can come out of the same conviction.
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?
Acquisition and loss of possessions appear in dream reports, and content analysis records misfortune involving objects more frequently than good fortune involving them.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Midas is granted exactly what he asks for, and the story is careful that nothing goes wrong with the wish. It is fulfilled precisely as stated.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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?
Nothing malfunctions in the Midas story. He gets exactly what he asked for, worded exactly as he said it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An appetite with no point at which it is finished.
What are the genre conventions?
A full store, a locked door, and somebody counting anyway.
How to subvert it
Write the wish granted and working out.
Try this
Two hundred words about somebody getting precisely what they asked 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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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