Famine in a dream: what does it mean?
Widespread failure of access to food, which is far more often about who can get it than about whether it exists.
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 availability. Food is frequently present in the country and out of reach of the people dying, and he would ask what the dreamer could see and not get.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note where the blame is put. Weather and crops are blamed and the distribution is the usual mechanism, which is a difference between an accident and a decision.
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?
Hunger and want appear in dream reports, and the continuity view treats waking material circumstances as tracking into dream content.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Economists studying twentieth-century famines have repeatedly found food exports continuing during them, which is the argument that entitlement rather than supply is the usual mechanism.
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?
Food has been exported from countries during their own famines. That fact is why the study of them is about who can buy rather than what exists.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
People dying beside food they cannot reach.
What are the genre conventions?
A ship leaving a harbour loaded, in a year everybody afterwards calls a failure of the crop.
How to subvert it
Write the famine caused by there being nothing.
Try this
Two hundred words about seeing something you cannot get.
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.
-
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.
-
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.