Savoury in a dream: what does it mean?
The full round taste of meat, broth and old cheese, which the languages of Europe had no single word for until one was borrowed.
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 missing word. People had the experience for as long as they had cooking and no name for it, and he would ask what the dreamer feels clearly and cannot say.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note what it does to other tastes. It is described less as a flavour of its own than as the thing that makes everything else taste more like itself.
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?
Meals and eating appear in dream reports, and content analysis records shared food among the most frequent reported dream activities.
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?
English named it by borrowing from Japanese, which is a rare case of a language admitting it had no word for something everybody in it had been tasting all along.
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?
Everybody had been tasting it since the first pot of broth. Nobody had a word, so the word had to be imported.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An experience that waited a long time for a name.
What are the genre conventions?
Stock reduced by half, and the difference it makes to everything.
How to subvert it
Write the savoury taste that stands alone.
Try this
Two hundred words about a sensation you had no word for.
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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