Loading spinner in a dream: what does it mean?
A picture of progress that contains no information about progress, turning at the same speed whether anything is happening or not.
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 false reassurance. Movement is being shown in place of news, and he would ask what the dreamer had been kept calm about rather than told about.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that a bar would be worse and better. A progress bar can be wrong in public, and a spinner cannot be wrong because it never claimed anything.
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?
Uncertainty and suspended action recur in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records being stuck among the commonly described situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
It turns at the same rate whether the work is nearly done or has failed entirely, and that is a design decision rather than a limitation.
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 cannot be wrong, because it never said anything. A progress bar can be wrong in front of everybody.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Motion offered in place of information.
What are the genre conventions?
A circle turning, and no way to tell for how long.
How to subvert it
Write the spinner that tells the truth.
Try this
Two hundred words about being reassured instead of informed.
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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