Fasting in a dream: what does it mean?
Choosing not to eat, which is different from hunger in every way except the physical sensation.
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 choosing. An appetite refused rather than unmet puts the dreamer on both sides of the transaction, and he would ask what was being demonstrated and to whom.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that fasting traditions almost always specify an end. The practice is bounded and the breaking of it is ritualised, which distinguishes it from deprivation entirely.
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?
Hunger and eating appear in dream reports, and continuity research finds food imagery tracks waking dietary restriction closely. Dreams of food increase measurably during periods of restriction.
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 hunger strike as political instrument is modern, but the fast used to compel a debtor or a wrongdoer is very old, and early Irish law made fasting against a person a formal legal procedure with rules.
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?
Early Irish law had a formal procedure for fasting on somebody's doorstep to force a settlement. It was a legal instrument with rules of service.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The appetite refused rather than unmet.
What are the genre conventions?
A laid table declined, and a stated end date.
How to subvert it
Write the fast being broken early and nobody minding except the faster.
Try this
Two hundred words about someone not eating on purpose, and the people around them who cannot tell the difference.
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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