Prostitute in a dream: what does it mean?
The figure appears in dreams to people who have no connection to sex work, and the dream is usually about a transaction rather than about sex.
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.
Freud
Freud discussed this material at length in terms that reflect his period's assumptions about women more than his own observation, and a reader should know that before weighing the reading.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading would attend to the exchange, since the dream has arranged for intimacy to have a price, and would ask what the dreamer feels they are paying for elsewhere.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Sexual dreams are commonly reported and their specific content carries no diagnostic weight. There is no finding that dreaming this indicates anything about the dreamer's conduct, wishes or history, and the older interpretive literature that implied otherwise was moralising rather than reporting.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.Mythological
The historical record is more various than the standard account, with temple contexts, guild arrangements and legal positions that differ enormously by place and period, and the flattening of all that into a single figure is itself worth noticing.
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.
In literature
The figure has been used as a device for so long, usually to be redeemed or to die, that its use is now a reliable indicator of how much thought a book has given to the people it is about.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It puts a price on something the plot elsewhere treats as priceless, which forces every other relationship in the book into comparison.
Genre conventions
Nineteenth century fiction moralises. Contemporary work that listens to the people concerned reads entirely differently, and the difference is instructive.
How to subvert it
Write her as bored, competent and entirely uninterested in being anybody's material.
Try this
Write four hundred words of a working night in which nothing dramatic occurs.
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.