Braiding in a dream: what does it mean?
Weaving three strands so that each holds the others, producing something stronger than the parts and impossible to shorten without undoing.
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 intimacy of the act. Braiding is usually done to someone else's hair, by someone standing behind them, and he would treat the position of the hands as the material.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that a braid cannot be partly undone. Working back to any point requires unpicking everything after it, which makes it an unusually exact image of a history.
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?
Repetitive manual and domestic activity is well represented in the dream reports of those who perform it, and continuity research finds care-giving actions recur particularly in family contexts.
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?
Braided hair carried marital and regional information across much of Europe, and Frazer records hair itself treated as dangerous once cut, requiring particular disposal.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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?
Cut hair had to be disposed of carefully in a great many places. It stayed connected to the person after it left them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Three things each holding the other two.
What are the genre conventions?
Someone standing behind, hands working, and a conversation neither has to look up for.
How to subvert it
Write it being undone, strand by strand, by the person it was made for.
Try this
Two hundred words about a small service done from behind, where neither party has to meet the other's eye.
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.