Altimeter in a dream: what does it mean?
The instrument that reports height, which does it by measuring air pressure, so it is really a barometer that has been relabelled.
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 indirectness. Height is not measured, something else is, and the number is inferred, and he would ask what the dreamer reads off a proxy.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the consequence. It has to be set to the local pressure, so the same instrument reads differently on the same day depending on what it has been told.
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?
Numbers and instruments appear in dream reports, and the neurocognitive account treats such detail as commonly unstable when examined in dreams.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
It is a barometer with a different scale on the face, and the pressure setting has to be updated on the way down, which is a real and known source of error.
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 does not know how high you are. It knows the pressure, and somebody has to tell it what the pressure means today.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A number that is really a guess about something else.
What are the genre conventions?
A dial with three hands, and a small window with a number set into it.
How to subvert it
Write the altimeter that measures height directly.
Try this
Two hundred words about reading one thing to learn another.
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.
-
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.
-
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.