Compliment in a dream: what does it mean?
Praise given in person, which puts the receiver in the odd position of having to do something about it.
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 awkwardness. Praise creates a small debt and there is no graceful way to settle it, and he would ask why the dreamer found being thought well of uncomfortable.
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 hardest to accept from the person whose opinion matters most. Praise from a stranger is pleasant and praise from somebody who knows you is an examination.
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?
Positive social interactions appear throughout dream reports, and content analysis records friendliness at a higher rate than aggression in most samples.
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?
Compliment and complement are the same word split in two, from complere, to fill up, so a compliment was originally a completing of the courtesies rather than a kindness.
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?
It leaves a small debt and there is no tidy way to pay it, which is why people say something silly and change the subject.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Praise that obliges the person receiving it.
What are the genre conventions?
Somebody looking at the floor and saying it was nothing.
How to subvert it
Write the compliment that lands.
Try this
Two hundred words about being told something good to your face.
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.