Cloud storage in a dream: what does it mean?
A word chosen to sound like weather, describing a shed full of machines in a field with a fence round it.
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 choice of image. Somebody picked the least physical thing in the sky to describe the most physical arrangement there is, and he would ask what the dreamer preferred not to picture.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the loss of place. A thing kept in a drawer has a location and a thing kept in the cloud has none, so people cannot say where their own photographs are.
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?
Losing something and being unable to find it recur across dream reports, and content analysis records loss among ordinary reported dream events.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The buildings are large, cooled, guarded and in places nobody visits, and the word chosen for them was the softest one available.
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?
Nobody can say where their own photographs are. They are in a building, in a country, and the word was picked so that nobody would ask.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The most physical arrangement there is, named after the least.
What are the genre conventions?
A field, a fence, and a low building with fans.
How to subvert it
Write the cloud as a drawer.
Try this
Two hundred words about not knowing where your own things are kept.
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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