Humility in a dream: what does it mean?
An accurate estimate of your own size, which is not the same as a low one, though the two are constantly confused.
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 display. Humility that is visible is doing work in public, and he would ask who the dreamer needed to observe them being modest and what that purchased.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that false humility and inflation are the same mistake in opposite directions. Both involve getting your own size wrong, and the dream may not distinguish which way.
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?
The dreamer's actual social position tends to be reproduced in dreams rather than reversed, and continuity research finds waking status and role relationships carried into dream content fairly directly.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
The word comes from humus, ground, and meant lowness before it meant virtue. The Latin sense is positional and the moral sense was added later.
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?
The word just means close to the ground. The virtue was added on afterwards by people with a use for it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Knowing your size, in either direction.
What are the genre conventions?
A refused compliment, and a room noticing the refusal.
How to subvert it
Write someone with an entirely accurate high opinion of themselves.
Try this
Two hundred words about a person getting their own importance exactly right, and nobody believing them.
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.
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.