Reboot in a dream: what does it mean?
The repair that works and explains nothing, leaving the fault unfound and the machine willing again.
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 unexamined cure. Something is fixed and nobody learns what was wrong, and he would ask what the dreamer had resolved by starting again rather than by understanding.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is a small death. Everything not written down is lost, everything saved survives, and the thing that comes back is the same and has no memory of the trouble.
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?
Waking and the transition out of sleep are commonly reported, and the neurocognitive account treats the return of executive control on waking as a marked change of state.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Bootstrapping is pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, which was chosen precisely because it is impossible, and the name stuck to the one machine that manages it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
The word comes from pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, picked because it cannot be done.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A cure that teaches nothing.
What are the genre conventions?
A dark screen, and then a logo.
How to subvert it
Write the reboot that fails.
Try this
Two hundred words about fixing something without finding out what was wrong.
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.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.