Rocking chair
A chair set on curved runners — a seat that moves without going anywhere, the rhythm itself being the function.
A rocking chair in a dream is the dream's image of a seat whose motion is the function. The chair does not carry the sitter anywhere; the gentle forward and back is the help the chair was built to give. The dream brings the rocking chair when something in your life — a grief being held in a small repeated motion, a thought being worked through by the same gesture over and over, an old woman's patience watching a child — is currently being maintained by a kept rhythm that goes nowhere and is the work. A rocking chair in easy motion by the fire is the dream affirming the useful slow rhythm. A rocking chair empty and still in the corner, the rhythm gone out of it, is the dream noting that the small ongoing motion that used to hold the room together has stopped.