Weight in a dream: what does it mean?
Dreams about weight are reported by people of every size, and they track how much a person is thinking about it rather than anything about their body.
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 measuring, since a dream that puts a number on a person has installed a judge somewhere, and would ask whose scale it was.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would treat the body in a dream as an image of how the dreamer is currently able to take up space, and would be slow to read it as being about size at all.
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?
Body-image content in dreams follows waking preoccupation rather than actual size, which is the ordinary continuity finding and is worth stating plainly on this page. If thoughts about eating or weight take up a large part of a person's day, that is worth talking to a doctor about. Eating disorders are common, treatable, and not a matter of willpower, and a dream is not evidence about anybody's body.
Our summary of continuity research on waking activity and dream content. See Schredl and Hofmann, Consciousness and Cognition 12(2), 2003, 298-308.What do myth and folklore say?
What a desirable body looked like has varied so completely across traditions and periods that any appeal to a natural standard collapses on contact with the record, which is the most useful thing this page can say.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after 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?
Bodies in fiction are described selectively and the selection reveals a writer's assumptions faster than any statement of them would, which is worth noticing before writing a single sentence about anybody's size.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is a number that a character can be told and cannot argue with, which is why it does so much quiet damage.
What are the genre conventions?
Commercial fiction still uses loss as a reward. The better contemporary work refuses the equation and has to work to do so.
How to subvert it
Write a character whose size is mentioned once, neutrally, and never again.
Try this
Write three hundred words of a bathroom with the scales put away in a cupboard.
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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