Airplane mode in a dream: what does it mean?
Deliberate unreachability with an excuse already attached, which is why people use it on the ground.
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 cover story. The setting is named for a situation the user is not in, and he would ask what permission the dreamer needed before they could be left alone.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is reversible and total. Everything arrives at once when it comes back on, so the peace is borrowed rather than given.
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?
Escape and withdrawal appear in dream reports, and the continuity view treats the wish for relief from waking pressure as ordinary dream material.
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?
Being unreachable was the default condition of human life until very recently, and it now requires a named setting and an implied aeroplane.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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?
It is named after a situation almost nobody using it is in, and that is the point: it comes with a reason.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Absence that arrives with its excuse already written.
What are the genre conventions?
A phone face down, and a quiet hour.
How to subvert it
Write the hour off that needs no excuse.
Try this
Two hundred words about needing a reason to be unavailable.
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.