Taxiing in a dream: what does it mean?
An aircraft moving on the ground under its own power, which is the part of a flight where the machine is at its least suited to what it is doing.
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 wrong element. Something built for one medium is labouring in another, and he would ask where the dreamer is doing badly what they are good at elsewhere.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the waiting in it. It is the slowest part of the journey and comes immediately before the fastest, so the sequence is deliberately anticlimactic.
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?
Waiting and delays appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records being late and being held up among the most persistent 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 word came from an early sense of a taxi as something that goes about slowly picking up trade, which is what an aircraft does on the ground.
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?
It is enormous, expensive and built for one thing, and here it is creeping about a car park at walking pace.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A thing doing badly what it is not for.
What are the genre conventions?
A wingtip passing a window very slowly, and a queue of them ahead.
How to subvert it
Write the taxiing that is quick.
Try this
Two hundred words about something clumsy on its way to being graceful.
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.
-
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.
-
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.