Cider in a dream: what does it mean?
Apples pressed and left to change, and the drink whose strength varies more than any other according to who made it.
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 strongly tied to a place and a season, and would probably ask who the dreamer was drinking with rather than what was in the glass.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take fermentation as its kind of image: something left alone in the dark that becomes stronger and different without being worked on. It would ask what the dreamer has left to sit.
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?
Alcohol in dreams is common and, in people who have stopped drinking, dreams of drinking are frequently reported and can be distressing on waking. They are widely recognised by people who work in recovery and are not a relapse.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Wassailing orchards in midwinter, with noise and cider poured at the roots of a chosen tree, was a genuine practice in the cider counties of England and persists in revived form. The stated purpose was to secure the next crop. Shotguns were fired into the branches as part of it, which is a detail most revivals leave out.
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 variation is the gift. Farmhouse cider being far stronger than expected is a plot device that requires no explanation to any reader who has met it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The harvest turned into something that keeps.
What are the genre conventions?
Rural, autumnal, and usually a signal that somebody is about to be unwise.
How to subvert it
Write the press itself, and the sheer quantity of apples it takes.
Try this
Two hundred words in an orchard in October.
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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