Shoe tree in a dream: what does it mean?
A form put inside a shoe when it is not being worn, which holds the shape while the leather dries out from a day of being walked in.
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 care taken in absence. The object is looked after when nobody is using it, and he would ask what the dreamer tends between uses.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note what it is actually managing. A shoe is damp inside after a day, and the drying is what deforms it, so the form is fighting moisture rather than shape.
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?
Objects and their care 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?
Cedar is used because it absorbs moisture as well as holding the shape, so the material is doing two jobs and the smell is a by-product of one of them.
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?
The shoe is wet inside at the end of the day and dries into whatever shape it is left in. That is the whole reason the object exists.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Looking after something during the time it is not used.
What are the genre conventions?
A cedar form pushed in with a click, and a smell in a wardrobe.
How to subvert it
Write the shoe tree used while walking.
Try this
Two hundred words about a thing tended between uses.
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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