Slide in a dream: what does it mean?
The slide is reported from the top, and dreamers frequently say they could not stop once they had started.
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 commitment, since a slide is a decision that cannot be revised halfway, and would ask what the dreamer has recently started.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would notice a descent that is fast, safe and chosen, which distinguishes it from most falling images and is probably why it appears in cheerful dreams as often as frightening ones.
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?
Falling sensations are among the most commonly reported dream experiences, and the controlled version is reported alongside the uncontrolled one. Under the continuity view this arrives from childhood and from parks, and its emotional tone tends to follow the dreamer's memory of those rather than any general meaning.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235. The reading also uses the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972).What do myth and folklore say?
There is no old tradition for the object, which is a nineteenth century playground invention, but descent as a passage into somewhere else is very old indeed and the two have obviously merged in the modern imagination.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Bulfinch).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?
Playgrounds are chronically underwritten given how much of childhood happens on them, and the equipment is specific enough to date a scene precisely. Playground equipment has also changed enormously for safety reasons within living memory, and a metal slide in full sun places a scene in a decade as precisely as a car would.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is a risk with a known ending, which makes it the first controlled fear most people choose.
What are the genre conventions?
Children's fiction uses the queue. Literary fiction uses an adult at the top of one, being watched.
How to subvert it
Write it from a parent who is genuinely frightened and saying nothing.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a playground in the rain.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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