Reaching in a dream: what does it mean?
Extending past the edge of your own balance, which is the moment a movement stops being safe and starts being a decision.
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 last few inches. Almost every reach could be made safe by moving the feet, and almost nobody does, and he would ask what the dreamer would not reposition for.
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 the whole vocabulary of wanting. Reaching for, out of reach, within reach: the language of desire is a language about arm length.
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?
Goal-directed action recurs in dream reports, and content analysis records striving and its frustration among ordinary reported dream events.
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?
Tantalus stands in water he cannot drink under fruit he cannot pick, and the punishment is constructed entirely out of reaching.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
You could move your feet. Almost nobody moves their feet, and that is where the reach becomes a decision.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Going past the edge of your own support.
What are the genre conventions?
Fingertips, and a shelf slightly too high.
How to subvert it
Write the reach that is comfortable.
Try this
Two hundred words about the last two inches.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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