Woodlouse in a dream: what does it mean?
A crustacean living on land, which means the thing under your flowerpot is more closely related to a crab than to any insect.
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 probably attend to the rolling up, since an animal whose defence is to become a sphere and wait is doing something a person can recognise.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a creature that must stay damp to breathe as an image of something dependent on conditions it cannot control, and would notice where the dream found it.
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?
They breathe through gill-like structures and dry out quickly, which is why they live under things and die on a windowsill. They are harmless, eat decaying matter, and are among the most useful animals in a garden.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
The local names run into the dozens across Britain and Ireland: slater, cheeselog, chiggy pig, gramersow, monkey pea. Few animals have collected so many regional words for something nobody particularly cares about. The Survey of English Dialects recorded dozens across a few hundred miles. Cheeselog belongs to Berkshire and almost nowhere else.
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?
Which word a character uses for one places them by county more reliably than an accent written out.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The sea creature living under a stone. Breathing through gills, in a garden.
What are the genre conventions?
Scuttling from under a lifted flagstone.
How to subvert it
Write the gills, and the fact that it is a crab that came ashore. Three hundred million years ago, and never went back.
Try this
Two hundred words about something in the wrong element and surviving. It has managed for three hundred million years.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.