Stratus in a dream: what does it mean?
A featureless layer of cloud, and the only cloud type most people have stood inside, because fog is stratus at ground level.
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 it being enterable. A cloud that can be walked into is the one kind that stops being a thing seen and becomes a thing occupied, and he would ask what the dreamer had got inside.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that from inside there is nothing to see. The cloud has no shape from within it, so being in the middle of a thing is the one position from which it cannot be recognised.
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?
Weather appears in a substantial proportion of dream reports, and continuity research finds it tracking recent waking conditions rather than carrying fixed meaning.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Fog and stratus are the same formation at different heights, so a hill walker in cloud and somebody looking up at a grey ceiling are describing one thing from two positions.
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?
Fog is just stratus that has reached the ground. The person in it and the person under it are in the same cloud.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The one you can be inside.
What are the genre conventions?
A grey ceiling from below, and nothing at all from within.
How to subvert it
Write it from both positions at once.
Try this
Two hundred words about a thing that cannot be recognised from the middle of 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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