Ringing in a dream: what does it mean?
A sound with no source, which is the only kind of noise you cannot walk away from.
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 privacy. A noise audible to one person in a silent room cannot be shared or verified, and he would ask what else the dreamer alone could hear.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that silence makes it worse. The quieter the room, the louder it is, which reverses the ordinary rule and makes rest the hardest condition.
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?
Auditory content is reported in a large majority of dreams in content-analysis samples, though far less often than visual content and usually as speech rather than as noise.
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?
A ringing in the ears was once read as a sign that somebody was talking about you, and which ear it was told you whether the talk was kind.
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?
It gets louder as the room gets quieter, so the one place you cannot escape it is the place you go to rest.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A sound that belongs to one person and cannot be proved.
What are the genre conventions?
A person in a silent house, tilting their head.
How to subvert it
Write the ringing as somebody calling.
Try this
Two hundred words about a noise you cannot leave behind by leaving.
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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