Menu in a dream: what does it mean?
A list of what is possible, which is also a list of everything you are about to not have.
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. Every selection is nineteen refusals, and he would ask what the dreamer regretted the moment they had decided.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the design of it. The second most expensive wine and the item in a box are placed deliberately, so the page is arranged to steer rather than to inform.
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?
Choice and indecision appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records being unable to decide among common situations.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Menu is simply the French for small or detailed, so the word describes the level of detail rather than the food at all.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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 item in a box and the second cheapest wine are placed on purpose. The page is designed to steer, not to inform.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A list of everything you are about to not have.
What are the genre conventions?
Two people reading, and one of them deciding first.
How to subvert it
Write the menu with one dish.
Try this
Two hundred words about choosing being mostly refusing.
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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