Wifi in a dream: what does it mean?
Something invisible whose shape you learn only from where it fails, so the map of it is a map of dead corners.
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 blame. A failure with no visible cause is attributed to whatever is nearest, and he would ask who in the dreamer's house got held responsible.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that people learn it as terrain. Everybody who lives somewhere knows which chair is bad and which corner of the garden works, and none of it is written down.
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?
Frustration with something that will not work recurs in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records repeated failed attempts among the commonly described situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Every household ends up with a folk geography of a thing nobody can see, passed on to visitors as advice about where to sit.
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?
Everyone who lives in a house knows which chair is bad, and nobody has ever written it down.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An invisible thing mapped entirely by where it stops.
What are the genre conventions?
A phone held slightly higher, near a window.
How to subvert it
Write the house with no dead corner.
Try this
Two hundred words about the folk geography of something nobody can see.
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.
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.