Pall in a dream: what does it mean?
The cloth laid over a coffin, which is what a pallbearer originally carried rather than the coffin itself.
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 it hiding the box. A cloth spread over a coffin conceals a thing everybody already knows is there, and he would ask what the dreamer had covered without concealing anything.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the job changed and the name did not. Pallbearers now carry the coffin, and the word records a duty that was to hold the corners of a cloth.
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?
Funerals and death appear in dream reports, and content analysis finds the dreamer more often witnessing such events than experiencing 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?
Guilds kept a fine pall for members' funerals, so the same embroidered cloth covered every coffin in the trade for generations and belonged to none of them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
A guild kept one good pall and it covered every member's coffin for generations. Nobody owned it and everybody used it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Covering something everybody already knows is there.
What are the genre conventions?
Heavy embroidered cloth over a box, and six people at the corners.
How to subvert it
Write the coffin uncovered.
Try this
Two hundred words about a job whose name records a duty nobody performs any more.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.