Ratio in a dream: what does it mean?
One quantity expressed against another, from the Latin for reason, which is the same word as rational and reckoning.
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 relation rather than the size. A ratio says nothing about how big anything is, only how they stand to each other, and he would ask what the dreamer compared instead of measured.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the unitlessness. Divide feet by feet and the feet cancel, so a ratio is the same number in any system, which is why it travels where measurements cannot.
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?
Comparison and proportion appear in dream reports, and the neurocognitive account treats relative judgements as more stable in dreams than absolute ones.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Ratio is reason and reckoning, the same root as rational, so a proportion and an argument are the same word in Latin.
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?
Divide feet by feet and the feet cancel, so a ratio means the same thing in every system of measurement there is.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A relationship that survives changing the units.
What are the genre conventions?
Two numbers, and a colon between them.
How to subvert it
Write the ratio that needs a unit.
Try this
Two hundred words about a number that is the same everywhere.
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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