Coat in a dream: what does it mean?
The layer worn between a person and the weather, put on to leave and taken off to arrive.
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 coat that cannot be found when the dreamer needs to leave, since being unable to go is a more common dream predicament than being unable to arrive.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take the coat as what a person puts on to face what is outside, and would be interested in a dreamer wearing somebody else's or one that no longer fits.
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?
Losing or searching for clothing is among the more frequently reported dream situations, and coats feature heavily because they are the garment most often put down in an unfamiliar place. The dream reproduces an ordinary risk.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., The typical dreams of Canadian university students (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
A coat handed down carried real economic weight for most of history, and turning a worn coat inside out to get another few years from it was common enough to give English the phrase about a turncoat. Tailors advertised the service, and a coat could be turned once because the cloth was woven to look acceptable on both faces.
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?
Pockets are the shortcut. What is in a character's coat pockets tells a reader more in one line than a paragraph of description.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The layer put on to go out into it.
What are the genre conventions?
Draped over shoulders as tenderness, or left behind as a clue.
How to subvert it
Write somebody buying one properly, once, for twenty years. The fitting, the price, and the flinch at it.
Try this
Two hundred words about a coat that still belongs to somebody who died.
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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