What does it mean to dream about flying A Kite?
Dreaming of flying a kite often reflects a light, hopeful mood and the pleasure of guiding something aloft while keeping it on a line.
Four ways to 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.
Freud
Freud would read the lifted kite as a gentle image of aspiration, a wish sent upward yet held by a string. The tether may stand for what keeps the dreamer's hopes within reach. He would ask what is being let rise and what holds it back.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung might see a balance of freedom and control, the spirit reaching high while staying grounded. The kite can mark a hope the dreamer can both pursue and steer. He would ask where waking life asks for that same poised lift.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
By the continuity view, a kite dream often carries over a calm or playful mood, or a small ambition you are nursing. The image gives that lightness a clear shape. It tends to track an ease you have felt rather than a worry.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Across cultures the kite has carried prayers, messages, and play into the sky, a thread between earth and air. It speaks of reaching toward the heights while keeping a hold below. The dream may echo that old wish to send something of yourself aloft.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Brewer).For writers
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.
In literature
The kite is one of the few objects fiction reliably uses for connection at a distance: a thing high up and out of reach that a person still holds. Franklin's kite experiment gave the image its second meaning, deliberately inviting something dangerous down a string, and both readings are available to a writer at once.
Franklin's account of the kite experiment (1752), public domain.What it does in a story
A kite makes a relationship visible as a line: tension, slack, and the constant possibility of the string going. It is a small image and it works best small, in scenes about parents and children or anyone managing distance.
Genre conventions
Children's fiction uses it for freedom and for the day out. Literary fiction uses it for the parent who is holding on and the child who is not. Historical fiction uses the Franklin reading, curiosity flown up into weather that could kill you.
How to subvert it
Cut the string and have nobody chase it. A kite lost without pursuit, in a story that then simply continues, is a more truthful image of letting go than any careful reeling in.
Try this
Write two people flying a kite while discussing something they cannot resolve, and let the state of the string track the argument without either of them mentioning it.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on. 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.
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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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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