Smartphone in a dream: what does it mean?
The object that occupies the last minute before sleep and the first after waking, which is the two slots dreams are made in.
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 where it sits. Whatever a person handles immediately before sleeping has first claim on the night, and he would ask what the dreamer had been looking at.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it has no single use. It is a camera, a map, a letter, a shop and a clock, so it stands for whatever the dreamer needed it for rather than for itself.
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 activity carries into dream content, and the continuity view treats what a person spends their hours doing as the best available predictor of what they dream about.
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?
Every object it replaced had its own dream meaning, and it absorbed them without acquiring one of its own, which is a strange position for an object to be in.
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?
It replaced the camera, the map, the letter and the clock, and every one of those had a meaning in this dictionary before it did.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
One object standing in for a dozen that each meant something.
What are the genre conventions?
A lit rectangle in a dark room, and a face above it.
How to subvert it
Write the phone that is only a telephone.
Try this
Two hundred words about the last thing looked at before sleeping.
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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