Butter churn
A wooden vessel with a plunger for making butter — patient repeated motion that turns milk into something denser.
A butter churn in a dream is the dream's image of patient repeated motion that turns milk into something denser. The churn does not invent the butter; the butter is in the milk already, and the work is in the long up-and-down of the plunger until the fat separates. The dream brings the churn when something in your life — a creative project, a relationship deepening, a discipline of thought — is currently being made denser by long repeated motion, not by any single breakthrough. A churn worked steadily until the butter forms is the dream affirming the patient method. A churn abandoned half-way, the milk slightly thickened but never separated, is the dream noting that the long motion was begun and dropped, and the good was in fact within a few hundred more strokes and is now not going to appear.