Lemming in a dream: what does it mean?
A small arctic rodent whose famous plunge from a cliff was staged for a camera, and which gave English a word for following a crowd over an edge.
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 appetite for the story. A belief about crowds was taken up eagerly and repeated for decades without anyone checking it, and he would ask what the dreamer wanted to be true about other people.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the word became a standing insult for people who follow. The metaphor is used constantly by those who have no idea it rests on an arranged piece of film.
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?
Beliefs held with confidence and no source appear within dreams as plain certainties, and the neurocognitive account treats unexamined given knowledge as a standard feature of dreaming cognition.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
The animals do disperse in great numbers when the population is high, and some drown crossing water they misjudge. The cliff sequence everyone remembers was arranged by a film crew, and the belief was already old by then.
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 footage was staged and the word entered the language anyway. People reach for the metaphor every week.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The crowd story that people wanted to be true.
What are the genre conventions?
A great many small animals moving one way, and a camera set up ahead of them.
How to subvert it
Write the film crew.
Try this
Two hundred words about a thing everybody knows that somebody arranged for a camera.
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.
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.