Mustard in a dream: what does it mean?
Mustard turns up in dreams as a taste and a colour at once, and dreamers who report it usually report the sharpness.
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 a strong taste in a dream at all, since taste is rarely reported, and would treat its presence as the notable part.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might reach for the proverbial seed, small and disproportionate in what it becomes, which is an image the dreamer will either recognise immediately or not at all.
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?
Taste and smell are the least reported dream senses by a wide margin, so a dream with a distinct taste in it is unusual on frequency grounds. That is a better reason to pay attention than any symbolic one.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
The seed appears as a figure for smallness producing largeness in more than one tradition, and the plant was cultivated and traded long before it was proverbial.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; 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?
Food writing is the only part of English prose with a working vocabulary for taste, and novelists borrowing from it usually borrow badly, with adjectives rather than with structure. The colour carries its own associations quite separately from the taste, and a mustard coloured coat in a novel is doing work that has nothing to do with food.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A strong flavour marks a character's tolerance and their origins in one gesture, which is efficient.
What are the genre conventions?
Domestic fiction uses the jar in the door of the fridge. Historical fiction uses the trade, which is a whole economy.
How to subvert it
Write an argument about how much of it goes on a sandwich and mean every word.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a meal ruined by a condiment.
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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