Manure in a dream: what does it mean?
Waste that is the most valuable thing on a farm, and one of the few substances people have gone to court over the ownership of.
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 wrote at length about the association between waste and money and would not need prompting here. It is worth recording that he would, and worth noting that in this case the association is not symbolic at all.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take rot feeding growth as one of the tradition's steadier images, and would notice whether the dreamer was disgusted or entirely matter of fact about it.
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?
Smell is rare in dream reports, so a dreamer who leads with it has given a strong detail. Anybody raised near livestock tends to describe this without disgust, which is itself informative.
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?
Guano from Peruvian islands was so valuable in the nineteenth century that it drove an international trade, a United States law claiming uninhabited islands that held it, and a war between Chile, Peru and Bolivia. Bird droppings redrew a map. The War of the Pacific left Bolivia landlocked, and it has never stopped asking for the coast back.
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 guano wars are one of the best true stories nobody uses, because the premise sounds like a joke and the consequences were not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The worthless thing that turns out to be the wealth.
What are the genre conventions?
A rural detail, or an insult.
How to subvert it
Write the tenancy clause forbidding its sale off the farm, and the argument about it.
Try this
Two hundred words about a valuable nobody wants to be near.
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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