Familiar in a dream: what does it mean?
An animal held to be an accomplice rather than a pet, which in the trial records made keeping a cat a piece of evidence.
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 what was made of ordinary company. Somebody living alone with an animal was recast as somebody in a partnership, and he would ask what innocent arrangement the dreamer has had reinterpreted.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note who was accused. An old woman with a cat and no household to speak for her was the recurring shape of the accusation, and the animal was the part written down.
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 appear in dream reports, and content analysis records animals among frequent reported dream characters.
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?
The word means simply of the household, from familia, so the term for a supposed demonic servant is the same word as family.
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?
Somebody lived alone and had a cat. In the record that became a second party to an agreement, and it was written down as evidence.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Company recast as conspiracy.
What are the genre conventions?
A cat on a lap in a room with one chair, and somebody writing it down.
How to subvert it
Write the familiar that is only a pet.
Try this
Two hundred words about ordinary company turned into evidence.
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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