Civet in a dream: what does it mean?
A small nocturnal mammal whose scent gland supplied perfumery for centuries and which is now better known for coffee.
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 source of the sweetness. A perfume base taken from a gland used for marking territory has an origin the wearer does not think about, and he would ask what the dreamer preferred not to trace.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the substance is foul at strength and pleasant heavily diluted. What is unbearable concentrated becomes desirable in the right quantity, which is a fact about proportion and not about the thing.
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?
Smell is the least frequently reported sense in dream accounts, and content analysis finds it noted rarely and generally only when very strong.
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?
Civet was a standard fixative in European perfumery and appears in Shakespeare, and the animals were kept in cages and the gland scraped, which is what the coffee trade now does differently and no better.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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 base note in a great deal of classical perfumery was scraped out of a caged animal. Almost nobody wearing it knew.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The unbearable thing that becomes desirable at the right dilution.
What are the genre conventions?
A cage, a gland scraped, and a bottle on a dressing table.
How to subvert it
Write the perfumer who stops.
Try this
Two hundred words about something lovely whose origin the people enjoying it decline to look at.
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.
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.