Currant in a dream: what does it mean?
Two different fruits under one name, one a tiny dried grape and the other a fresh berry, which causes more confusion than either deserves.
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 probably attend to the picking-out, since currants in a bun are the thing children remove and set aside, deliberately and one at a time.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a single word covering two unrelated things as a small caution about assuming shared meaning, and would ask which one the dreamer saw.
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?
The dried currant is a grape and the blackcurrant is a completely different plant, and only the name connects them. Blackcurrants were effectively banned in much of the United States for most of a century because the bushes host a pine disease.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Blackcurrant cordial was distributed to British children during the Second World War because citrus could not be imported and the fruit is exceptionally high in vitamin C. A wartime shortage created a national taste that has never gone. Ribena was developed for the scheme and outlived it entirely. It was free on prescription for children during the war.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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?
A national flavour preference created by a wartime import failure is a good small example of how tastes are made rather than found.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Two unrelated things under one word. Both in the same kitchen cupboard.
What are the genre conventions?
In a bun, being picked out by a child.
How to subvert it
Write the 1942 cordial scheme, and the ration book.
Try this
Two hundred words about a taste somebody was given rather than chose. They have loved it for eighty years.
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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