Take-off in a dream: what does it mean?
The moment the aircraft stops touching the ground, which has a point past which it cannot be abandoned and everybody in the cockpit knows the number.
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 point of no return. There is a speed after which stopping is more dangerous than going, and he would ask when the dreamer passed the moment for changing their mind.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the calling of it. One of the crew says the number aloud, so the moment of commitment is announced rather than felt.
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?
Beginnings and commitment appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records flight and rising among persistent dream themes.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
The decision speed is calculated for every departure from the weight, the runway and the weather, so the point of no return is a number worked out that morning.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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?
There is a speed after which you are going whatever happens. Somebody says it out loud, and after that the decision is made.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A moment after which stopping is worse than going.
What are the genre conventions?
A hand on the levers, a number called, and the hand coming off.
How to subvert it
Write the take-off that can be abandoned at any point.
Try this
Two hundred words about the last moment you could have changed your mind.
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.