Anointing in a dream: what does it mean?
Marking somebody with oil to set them apart, which is where the words messiah and christ come from, both meaning simply the anointed one.
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 mark that does not show. Oil leaves nothing visible afterwards, and he would ask what change in the dreamer left no trace.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the range of uses. The same act makes a king, ordains a priest and prepares the dying, so one gesture covers the beginning and the end of a life.
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?
Being marked and being singled out appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among ordinary reported dream material.
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?
Messiah and christ are the Hebrew and Greek words for anointed, so two of the largest words in Western religion are a description of this gesture.
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?
Two of the biggest words in the language are just descriptions of this. Somebody had oil put on them, and the word for that became a title.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A mark that leaves nothing behind.
What are the genre conventions?
A thumb, a small horn of oil, and nothing visible a minute later.
How to subvert it
Write the anointing that shows.
Try this
Two hundred words about a gesture that became a title.
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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