Palate in a dream: what does it mean?
The roof of the mouth, which separates eating from breathing and is also the word for judgement about taste.
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 double meaning. A word for a piece of anatomy that also means discernment locates judgement in the mouth, and he would ask what the dreamer decided by taste alone.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is a partition. Its physical job is to keep two processes apart so both can happen at once, which is a modest function for something the language made into taste.
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 is among the least frequently reported sensations in dream accounts, and content analysis finds it noted rarely and usually only when strong or unexpected.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The hard palate separates the mouth from the nose, and much of what is called taste is actually smell arriving from behind, through the same space the palate is dividing.
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?
Most of what people call taste is smell coming up from behind. The palate is a partition that got the credit.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A partition that the language turned into judgement.
What are the genre conventions?
A held mouthful, a considered pause, and a word for it.
How to subvert it
Write somebody with no sense of smell tasting carefully.
Try this
Two hundred words about credit for a decision going to the wrong part of the body.
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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