Princess in a dream: what does it mean?
The princess is reported as a role rather than a person, and dreamers frequently say they were her without being able to describe her.
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 be interested in a figure defined by being valuable and unavailable, and would ask who in the dreamer's life has been placed in that position, which may be the dreamer.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would distinguish the figure who waits from the figure who is kept, since the tales contain both and they are not the same image at all.
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?
Under the continuity view this comes overwhelmingly from stories and from a particular industry's version of them, and childhood exposure is a strong predictor. What the dream does with the figure is more informative than the figure itself.
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?
The older tale versions are considerably more active than the familiar ones, with the daughter doing the rescuing often enough that the passive version looks like an editorial decision rather than a tradition.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after the Grimm collection; Bulfinch).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 figure carries so much cultural argument now that using her at all is a position, and writers who ignore that produce books that read as either naive or evasive.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
She is valued for what she is rather than what she does, which is a predicament with a great deal of contemporary resonance.
What are the genre conventions?
Children's fiction rehabilitates her. Literary fiction ages her, and asks what happens to a person raised to be looked at.
How to subvert it
Write her doing administration competently and being praised only for her appearance.
Try this
Write four hundred words of a young woman being photographed for the ninth time that day.
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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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