Thin in a dream: what does it mean?
Dreams about being thin, or about somebody else being thin, are reported by people at every size, and the dream is not a verdict on anybody's 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 who is looking, since a dream about how a body appears has always installed an observer somewhere, and would ask whose eyes those were.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would treat the body in a dream as an image of how the dreamer is currently able to occupy space, and would be slow to read it as being about weight 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?
Body-image content in dreams tracks waking preoccupation rather than actual size, which is the ordinary continuity finding and is worth stating plainly. If thoughts about eating or body size are taking up a lot of a person's day, that is worth talking to a doctor about, and eating disorders are common, treatable, and not a matter of willpower. A dream is not evidence about a body.
Our summary of continuity research on waking activity and dream content. See Schredl and Hofmann, Consciousness and Cognition 12(2), 2003, 298-308.What do myth and folklore say?
What a desirable body looked like has varied so enormously across traditions and periods that any appeal to a natural standard collapses immediately on contact with the record.
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?
Bodies in fiction are described selectively, and which ones get described at all is one of the clearest indicators of a writer's assumptions, usually invisible to them.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is a state readers will read as achievement or as illness depending on what they bring, which makes it unusually unstable as an image.
What are the genre conventions?
Commercial fiction still uses it as a reward. The better contemporary work refuses the equation and has to work to do so.
How to subvert it
Write a character whose size is mentioned once, neutrally, and never again.
Try this
Write three hundred words of somebody getting dressed without a mirror.
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.