Standing to attention in a dream: what does it mean?
A posture with every part specified, held for somebody else's benefit, which is what makes it a posture rather than a way of standing.
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 surrender of choice. Where the hands go, where the eyes go and where the heels go are all decided elsewhere, and he would ask what relief the dreamer found in not deciding.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it makes people identical. A line of individuals is turned into a unit by everybody adopting the same shape, and no other instruction achieves that so quickly.
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?
Conformity and being one of a group appear in dream reports, and content analysis records group settings as common in ordinary dreams.
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?
Drill was taught for the sake of manoeuvre on a battlefield, and it long outlived the tactics, surviving as a way of making a body obedient rather than useful.
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?
Where the hands go, where the eyes go and where the heels go are all somebody else's decision, and that is the appeal.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A line of people made into one thing by a shape.
What are the genre conventions?
Heels together, eyes front, nothing moving.
How to subvert it
Write attention as comfortable.
Try this
Two hundred words about the relief of not deciding where to put your hands.
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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