Leather in a dream: what does it mean?
Skin preserved by being chemically altered, which is why it lasts for centuries when the animal it came from would not last a week.
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 smell, which is one of the few that almost everybody finds pleasant and which is entirely the product of the tanning rather than the animal.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a material that softens with use and takes the shape of its owner as worth noticing, since very few things a person owns do that.
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?
Objects that record their owner's use are unusually common in dreams of the dead, and a worn wallet or a shaped shoe carries somebody more directly than a photograph does. The moulding is the point.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Tanning was a stinking trade banished to the edge of towns and downstream of everybody, using dog and pigeon dung and urine collected by the bucket. The pleasant smell of a finished bag is the end of a process nobody wanted to live near. Tanners' children were said to be immune to plague, which was almost certainly wrong and was widely believed.
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?
The gap between the tannery and the shop is the material: the same object, at two ends of a process, and only one end is ever written.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The skin that outlasts the animal.
What are the genre conventions?
A jacket for danger, or a book binding for age.
How to subvert it
Write the tannery, downwind, and the people who worked in it.
Try this
Two hundred words about an object shaped by one person's use.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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