The most famous stair in the literature of dreams belongs to scripture. In Genesis, Jacob sleeps at Bethel with a stone for a pillow and dreams of a ladder, or in some renderings a stairway, set on the earth with its top reaching heaven, the angels of God ascending and descending on it. The dream is received as revelation, and Jacob wakes to declare the place the house of God. Whatever else stairs have meant since, the image of steps joining low to high entered the tradition there, carrying the sense of traffic between worlds.
Freud gave stairs a very different notoriety. In The Interpretation of Dreams he listed staircases, ladders and flights of steps among the typical dream symbols his theory read sexually, an interpretation that became one of the most quoted and most parodied claims of psychoanalysis. It belongs to Freud's system and is recorded here as his school's reading, not as an established property of stairs.
Between revelation and analysis sits the plain reading most modern interpreters use: stairs measure movement between levels, of standing, of understanding, of depth, and the dream's sense follows the direction of travel and the condition of the steps. Climbing with ease, labouring upward, descending into the dark and stairs that end nowhere are read as four different reports on where the dreamer is going.