Tall in a dream: what does it mean?
Being taller than usual, or facing somebody who is, is reported as a change in the room rather than in the body.
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 relative sizes, since a dream that alters height has altered a relation rather than an anatomy, and would ask who the dreamer was standing next to.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would take a change of stature as a statement about standing in the ordinary social sense, and would notice whether the dreamer found it comfortable.
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?
Distortions of size and scale are commonly reported in dreams and also in the drowsy state before sleep, where they have been described clinically for a long time and given various names. They are harmless and are more common in children.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Giants and outsized figures appear in a very wide range of traditions and are usually older than the current order rather than stronger within it, which is a distinction the modern usage has lost.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; 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?
Height is one of the few physical attributes that changes every social interaction a character has, and it is chronically underused by writers who reach for it as description rather than as circumstance. The other underwritten part is the assumption of authority that comes with it, which arrives unasked and is very hard for the person concerned to refuse.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It gives a character an unearned advantage they cannot put down, which is a useful thing to make somebody carry.
What are the genre conventions?
Genre fiction uses it for intimidation. Literary fiction uses the doorframes, the shopping and the aeroplane seats.
How to subvert it
Write somebody very tall who is habitually apologetic about it.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a room described from six foot seven.
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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