Leapfrog in a dream: what does it mean?
Vaulting over a person bent double, which works only because the one underneath agrees to stay exactly where they are.
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 bent back. A game in which one player makes an obstacle of their own body and the other uses it to get ahead has a plain shape, and he would ask which position the dreamer was in.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the roles swap without discussion. Whoever lands becomes the next back, so the advantage is structurally temporary and nobody stays over the top for long.
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?
Physical activity involving other people is commonly reported in dreams, and content analysis records friendly interactions at a higher rate than aggressive ones in most samples.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The word arrived in English as a name for the game and then for anything that gets ahead by going over the top of what came before, which is the sense that survives in business talk.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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 one underneath has the harder job and gets no credit, and in ten seconds it will be the other one's turn.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Advancing over somebody who has agreed to hold still.
What are the genre conventions?
A line of backs, and a boy running at the first of them.
How to subvert it
Write the back that stands up early.
Try this
Two hundred words about the person who bends down so somebody else can get past.
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.
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.