Pomade in a dream: what does it mean?
A heavy grease for holding hair in a shape, whose name comes from the apple that the original was scented with.
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 holding of a shape. Hair is made to stay where it is put, and he would ask what the dreamer keeps in an arrangement that would otherwise move.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the persistence of the material. It does not wash out easily, so a hairstyle survives a night and a pillow, which is what the product is for.
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?
Appearance and grooming appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such personal detail among frequent reported dream content.
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?
Pomade is from pomme, apple, because early preparations were made with apple pulp and were scented accordingly, so a grease is named after fruit.
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?
It is named after apples. The early ones were made with apple pulp, and the name stuck to a substance that has not contained fruit for a very long time.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Hair made to stay where it is put.
What are the genre conventions?
A tin turned in the fingers to warm it, and a comb going through once.
How to subvert it
Write the pomade that washes out.
Try this
Two hundred words about a name that outlived its ingredient.
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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