Regimental colours in a dream: what does it mean?
The flags carried by a regiment, which were once a rallying point in smoke and are now an object treated with more ceremony than anything else it owns.
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 weight put on cloth. An object is defended at real cost, and he would ask what the dreamer would not let be taken.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note where they end up. Old ones are laid up in churches and left to fall apart untouched, so the ceremony includes not repairing them.
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?
Flags and ceremonial objects appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among ordinary reported dream material.
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?
They served as a visible rallying point when a battlefield was full of smoke, so the reverence descends from a practical function that has entirely gone.
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?
Old ones are hung in a church and deliberately not mended. They are allowed to fall to pieces, and that is the correct treatment.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Cloth defended at a cost nobody would justify for cloth.
What are the genre conventions?
A tattered flag high in a nave, under glass or under nothing.
How to subvert it
Write the colours that are repaired.
Try this
Two hundred words about letting something decay on purpose.
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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