Landlord in a dream: what does it mean?
Somebody who owns the place you live, which makes your home an asset on their balance sheet and the whole of your life on yours.
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 asymmetry. The same building is an investment to one party and everything to the other, and he would ask which side of that the dreamer was standing on.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the word itself. Lord is in it and has not been taken out, so the arrangement announces its own history every time anybody says it.
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?
Home and its security appear throughout dream reports, and content analysis records houses among the most frequently reported dream settings.
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 is a thousand years old and describes the same relationship it always did, which is a long time for a term of art to need no revision.
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?
Lord is in the word and nobody has taken it out in a thousand years.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
One building, an investment to one person and a life to another.
What are the genre conventions?
A key that opens your door and is not yours.
How to subvert it
Write the landlord as a neighbour.
Try this
Two hundred words about a home that is somebody else's asset.
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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