Space in a dream: what does it mean?
Space in a dream is reported as silent, and dreamers frequently say they could breathe and did not find that strange.
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 treat weightlessness as a version of the flying material he discussed, and would ask what the dreamer has been released from.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would take the emptiness rather than the stars, and would notice whether the dreamer was alone, since these dreams are frequently reported as solitary and not lonely.
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?
Flying and floating dreams are among the most commonly reported types anywhere, and the space version is a modern setting for a very old sensation. The lack of concern about breathing is a good example of how readily dreams accept impossible premises without comment.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
The sky as a place that can be travelled to rather than only observed appears in a great many traditions long before it was possible, usually reserved for the dead or for a very few living visitors.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; Frazer).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?
Scale is the permanent problem, since the actual distances are unwritable and every book that tries either shrinks them or stops the plot to explain them. The other durable subject is the waiting, since most of the actual work has always been done by people on the ground who never went anywhere, and their books are better than the astronauts'.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It gives a character an environment with no history in it, which is either liberating or unbearable depending on the book.
What are the genre conventions?
Science fiction fills it. Literary fiction uses somebody watching a launch from a car park.
How to subvert it
Write it as boring, which by every account of it, it substantially is.
Try this
Write four hundred words of a maintenance task performed for the ninth time.
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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