Ribbon in a dream: what does it mean?
A strip of cloth whose entire purpose is to be tied, and which carries more meaning per inch than almost any other material.
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 tying, since a ribbon is fastened by somebody, often onto somebody else, and the act is usually performed with more care than the object warrants.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a colour worn to declare something as a workable image, since ribbons have marked mourning, allegiance, campaign and remembrance without changing shape at all.
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?
The awareness ribbon has multiplied so far that most colours now carry several causes and the system has largely stopped communicating, which is an interesting failure of a symbol by success rather than neglect.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Ribbons tied to trees at holy wells and clootie wells across Ireland and Scotland are meant to rot as the ailment fades, which is why synthetic ribbon left at one defeats the purpose and is a genuine problem at those sites. Volunteers now cut it off and are sometimes accused of vandalism for it.
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.
Where does this appear in literature?
A rag tied to a tree that has to rot to work, and the nylon one beside it that never will, is a complete image of a tradition meeting the present.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The declaration made in a colour. Understood without a word, and now barely.
What are the genre conventions?
In a girl's hair, in a period scene.
How to subvert it
Write the clootie well, and the volunteer cutting the nylon off.
Try this
Two hundred words about an offering that must decay to work. Somebody has tied a plastic one beside it.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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