Roulette in a dream: what does it mean?
A spun wheel with numbered pockets, where the whole business rests on the pockets that belong to neither colour.
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 near miss. A ball settling one pocket away produces more feeling than a ball settling far off, though they pay identically, and he would ask what almost-happened the dreamer keeps returning to.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the two colours. The board looks like a fair coin dressed up, and the zero is the small asymmetry that makes the whole room possible.
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?
Gambling and games of chance appear in dream reports, and the continuity view reads them as carry-over from waking risk rather than as prediction of an outcome.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
The wheel is called the little wheel and the house edge is one pocket, or two where the board carries a double zero, which is the only difference between the versions.
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?
The zero is green so it belongs to nobody, and belonging to nobody is exactly how it pays for the building.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A fairness with one small hole in it, kept in plain sight.
What are the genre conventions?
A ball rattling, and a table where everyone leans in at the same moment.
How to subvert it
Write the player who only ever bets the green.
Try this
Two hundred words about an edge that is not hidden and works anyway.
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.
-
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.
-
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.