Lice in a dream: what does it mean?
Lice in a dream are reported with more shame than fear, and the reported detail is usually who else might know.
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 shame rather than the creature, and would ask whom the dreamer imagines discovering it, since the dream is organised around being found out.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would be interested in something small and numerous living on the dreamer unnoticed, which is a plain image for a habit rather than for a parasite.
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?
Under the continuity view head lice are ordinary, extremely common in children, and unrelated to cleanliness, which is worth saying because the shame attached to them is out of all proportion to the fact. Parents of school-age children report them in dreams for the same reason they report homework.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Delousing appears in the historical record as a companionable activity rather than a private disgrace, which is a useful corrective to how the subject is now handled.
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?
Infestation writing usually reaches for horror when the truthful register is embarrassment, and embarrassment is harder and funnier. The best treatments are in memoir rather than fiction. The subject is also a reliable marker of who a book expects to be reading it, since the register shifts entirely depending on whether the reader is assumed to have dealt with them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It gives a character a secret that is trivial, undeserved and socially expensive, which is a very useful combination.
What are the genre conventions?
Historical fiction uses them for squalor. Contemporary fiction uses them for school gate politics, which is more accurate.
How to subvert it
Write a parent who is entirely unbothered and a school that is not.
Try this
Write three hundred words of somebody combing a child's hair by a lamp.
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.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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.