Baby food in a dream: what does it mean?
Feeding a child, or being unable to, comes up in dreams around real caretaking, and the reported detail is usually whether the food was accepted.
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 placed feeding at the beginning of everything, and would read the scene as being about dependence in either direction, since a dream about feeding is also a dream about being fed.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would attend to what is being handed over and whether it is taken, and would allow that the person being fed in the dream may stand for the dreamer.
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?
Under the continuity view this tracks caretaking directly, and parents of young children report dreams about feeding, dropping and forgetting them at rates that fall away as the child grows. Sleep fragmentation in that period also raises recall, which is part of why the dreams are so vivid.
Our summary of continuity research on waking activity and dream content. See Schredl and Hofmann, Consciousness and Cognition 12(2), 2003, 298-308.What do myth and folklore say?
Weaning is ritualised in a great many traditions, often with a specific day, food or person attached, which suggests the separation was understood to be a real one and not only for the child.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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?
Almost nobody writes feeding well, because it is repetitive, undignified and takes forty minutes, and those are exactly the qualities a novel about early parenthood needs to convey.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It is the plainest possible test of whether a character can put someone else first, repeated several times a day.
What are the genre conventions?
Comic writing uses the mess. Literary fiction uses the tedium, which is harder and truer.
How to subvert it
Write it from the point of view of somebody who is very good at it and takes no pleasure in it at all.
Try this
Write three hundred words of one meal, in real time, with a child who will not open their mouth.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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