Smoking in a dream: what does it mean?
Preserving food by hanging it in smoke, which works because smoke carries compounds that kill and dry at the same time.
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 by-product doing the work. Smoke was there anyway and turned out to preserve, and he would ask what the dreamer found a use for that was already happening.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the accidental origin. Meat hung in a roof above a fire keeps better, which is a thing a household would discover without meaning to.
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?
Fire and food appear 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?
Cold smoking flavours and preserves without cooking, while hot smoking cooks as well, and they are two different operations sharing one word.
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?
Somebody hung meat in a roof because there was room, and it kept. Nobody set out to invent this and everybody had a fire.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A by-product turning out to be a method.
What are the genre conventions?
A hooked side of bacon high in a chimney, dark and dry.
How to subvert it
Write the smoking that requires no fire.
Try this
Two hundred words about finding a use for what was already happening.
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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