Perfumery in a dream: what does it mean?
A shop where the product cannot be photographed, described accurately or returned once smelled.
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 scent's directness, since smell reaches memory faster than any other sense and a perfumery is a room designed around that.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a shop selling something invisible as worth noticing, since the customer is buying an effect on other people rather than an object.
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 the least frequently reported sense in dream accounts by a wide margin, so a dreamer who reports one has given something unusual. It is also the sense most directly wired to memory, which is why a perfume can return a person to a room instantly.
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?
Perfumes are built in three stages that appear over hours, and the top notes a customer smells in a shop are gone within twenty minutes. Almost nobody buys the scent they actually wear. Shops keep blotters precisely so a customer can leave and come back to it.
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?
Buying a perfume on notes that will have evaporated before you get home is a small perfect image of choosing on the wrong evidence.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The purchase judged on what disappears first. And lived with for a year afterwards.
What are the genre conventions?
A dead relative's scent, recognised in a crowd.
How to subvert it
Write the three stages, and the person who waits four hours before deciding. They come back the following week.
Try this
Two hundred words about choosing something on evidence that will not last. By the bus stop it is a different smell entirely.
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.