Tanner
A worker who turns hide into leather — a craft of slow, foul, chemical conversion that produces a long-lasting good.
A tanner in a dream is the dream's image of a worker whose craft is to turn raw hide into leather through a slow, foul, chemical conversion. The work smells; the work is long; the result is a material that lasts for generations. The dream brings the tanner when something in your life — a piece of long emotional work, a relationship being toughened by patient handling, a personal transformation that carries an unpleasant phase — is currently in the middle of a conversion process that is not pleasant to be near and is producing something that will be durable. A tanner finishing a hide cleanly is the dream affirming the trusted craft. A tanner who has abandoned a hide mid-process, with the conversion neither raw nor finished, is the dream noting that the long unpleasant work was begun and dropped, and what remains is going to spoil rather than become leather.