Tannery in a dream: what does it mean?
The trade every town needed and every town put downwind, downstream and outside the walls.
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 exclusion, since a tannery is a necessary trade that a community agrees to keep out of sight and smell, and the people working in it were treated accordingly.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a place where skin is turned into something durable as the material, and would notice that the process is one of preserving rather than making.
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?
Tanning uses chromium in most modern processes and effluent is a serious water pollution issue where regulation is weak. The trade is still located where the consequences fall on somebody else.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Traditional tanning used dog and pigeon dung and urine collected in barrels from the town, and children were employed to gather it. Whole streets are still named after the trade in cities that have not had a tannery for four hundred years. Barkers and Curriers and Skinners survive the same way. All three were separate trades and all three stank.
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?
Tanner's Row, four centuries after the last tannery, is a piece of free historical geography sitting in half the street atlases in these islands.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The necessary trade nobody will live beside. Downwind, downstream, and outside the wall.
What are the genre conventions?
A stench, mentioned once, to establish a medieval town. And never mentioned again.
How to subvert it
Write the children collecting, and what they were paid. By the bucket, and not much.
Try this
Two hundred words about a job everybody needs and nobody wants nearby. The wind changes twice a week.
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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