Fleece in a dream: what does it mean?
A sheep's wool taken off in one piece, and a verb meaning to defraud somebody thoroughly and leave them with nothing.
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 second meaning. A word for taking everything off an animal that came to mean stripping a person is a metaphor nobody had to explain, and he would ask who had been shorn.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the animal is unharmed. Shearing is not injury and the word for cheating came from it anyway, so the metaphor took the completeness and left out the survival.
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?
Animals and materials appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds livestock occurring most for people who keep them.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
The Lord Chancellor sat on a woolsack in the Lords to mark where England's wealth came from, and the sack is still there with wool from several Commonwealth countries in it.
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?
The Lord Chancellor sat on a sack of wool to mark where the country's money came from, and the sack is still in the chamber.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A word for taking everything, borrowed from something that harms nobody.
What are the genre conventions?
A whole coat coming off in one piece, and an animal walking away.
How to subvert it
Write the metaphor keeping the survival in it.
Try this
Two hundred words about a comparison that kept the thoroughness and dropped the part where nobody is hurt.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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