Baloney in a dream: what does it mean?
Processed meat is an unglamorous dream object, and it usually carries whatever the dreamer feels about the household it came from.
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 associations rather than the food, since a dream that supplies something this specific has reached for a particular memory.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
For Jung ordinary food can image sustenance without ceremony, and its plainness in a dream is often the point: this is what was actually eaten rather than what was celebrated.
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 food dreams follow real eating and real memory, and the childhood packed lunch is among the more commonly reported food images.
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?
Preserved meat is one of the oldest food technologies and the customs around it are practical rather than sacred: what keeps, how long, and who gets the good part.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Brewer).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?
Cheap food is one of the most reliable class markers in fiction and one of the most affectionately written, because it is what people remember rather than what they aspired to. The sandwich made the same way every day for years is one of the more affecting objects in domestic writing, because it stands for somebody getting up early.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It places a household economically in one word without commentary. Structurally it does the work of a paragraph of description.
What are the genre conventions?
Literary fiction uses the school lunch. Memoir uses it for affection. Satire uses the word itself, which has meant nonsense for a century. Working-class fiction uses the lunch tin, which is a whole household economy in one object.
How to subvert it
Write somebody serving it to a guest who has never eaten it, without embarrassment.
Try this
Write a packed lunch from 1979, item by item, and let the reader work out everything about the household.
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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