Grater in a dream: what does it mean?
A sheet of holes with raised edges, which does nothing but increase the surface of a thing enormously.
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 nothing being removed. Grating changes no quantity at all and only the shape, and he would ask what the dreamer had rearranged without adding or losing anything.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the change is entirely about contact. More surface means faster melting, stronger flavour and quicker drying, so the same material behaves differently by being divided.
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?
Food preparation appears in dream reports, and continuity research finds cooking routine reproduced most reliably by the people who perform it.
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 same weight of cheese melts far faster grated than in a block, and every use of the tool is that one principle applied, which is why it works on nutmeg and on knuckles alike.
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?
It changes no quantity whatever. All it does is make the outside enormous, which is the entire reason it works.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Rearranging something without adding or removing any of it.
What are the genre conventions?
A block going down to a heap, and the same weight in both.
How to subvert it
Write it uncut.
Try this
Two hundred words about a change that alters nothing except how much of a thing is on the outside.
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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