{
  "id": "american-dream.upward-reach",
  "term": "american dream",
  "sense": "upward-reach",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 19,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "A collective self's story that each member, from any window it starts in, can enter a wider one by its own action.",
  "folk_gloss": "the ideal that anyone in the United States can prosper through their own effort",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "collective-self.shared",
      "story.narrative",
      "narrative.self-story",
      "member.social",
      "window.range",
      "start.action",
      "enter.spatial",
      "reach.action",
      "wide.spatial",
      "action.deed",
      "hope.emotional",
      "possibility.potential"
    ],
    "interaction": "The collective narrative is spent on its members' reach rather than on its own: it reads every member's walls as movable by that member, which keeps members acting toward wider windows and reads the group's worth by how many do.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "a group story about each member's reach",
      "the group's walls read as open from below",
      "a promise whose test is individual lives"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The historian James Truslow Adams popularised the phrase 'the American dream' in his 1931 book The Epic of America.",
      "domain": "history"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "hope.emotional",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "hope is one self reading a closed window as reachable; this is a group's story that its members' windows are open"
    },
    {
      "id": "narrative.self-story",
      "type": "is-a",
      "note": "a collective self's story about the reach it grants its members"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "american dream",
    "the american dream"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-american-dream.upward-reach"
}