Rum in a dream: what does it mean?
Rum in a dream is reported for the smell and the associations rather than the drinking, and the setting is usually somebody else's.
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 drink that arrives with a whole scene attached, and would ask which of the associations the dreamer actually has and which they have borrowed.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would be more interested in the state the dreamer expects it to produce than in the drink, and would notice whether the dream got there.
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 real drinking and real settings. Where a dream involves drinking against a person's intention, that is worth noting rather than interpreting, and support for it exists and works.
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?
The spirit's history is inseparable from the plantation economies and the trade in enslaved people that produced it, which is documented and is a considerable weight for a drink to carry.
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?
The drink arrives in fiction pre-loaded with sailors and pirates, which is a nineteenth century literary invention laid on top of a much uglier history, and a writer using the first without knowing the second will be caught.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It signals a particular kind of licensed escape, which is why it appears in so many stories about people at the end of something.
What are the genre conventions?
Adventure fiction romanticises. Caribbean writing knows exactly what the estate was, and reads entirely differently.
How to subvert it
Write it being drunk by somebody who knows the history and drinks it anyway.
Try this
Write two hundred words of a bottle in a cupboard that nobody has opened.
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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