Tailings in a dream: what does it mean?
The fine ground waste left after ore has been processed, which is a slurry rather than a rock pile and behaves like a liquid when it fails.
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 deceptive stillness. It looks like ground and is not, and he would ask what the dreamer has treated as solid.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the containment. It is held behind a dam that has to stand permanently, so a temporary industrial by-product requires a structure with no end date.
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?
Ground giving way appears in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among ordinary reported dream material.
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?
Tailings dams have to be maintained long after the mine that made them has closed, which is a liability that outlasts the company in a great many cases.
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 looks like a field and it is a liquid. The dam holding it has to stand forever, and the company that built it will not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Something that looks solid and is not.
What are the genre conventions?
A flat grey surface with a crust on it, and no plants anywhere near.
How to subvert it
Write the tailings that are safe to walk on.
Try this
Two hundred words about a structure that has to outlast whoever built it.
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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