Aftertaste in a dream: what does it mean?
What is still in the mouth once the thing is gone, which is the only part of eating that happens without the food.
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 persistence. The experience continues after its cause has been removed, and he would ask what is still with the dreamer that has already ended.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the reversals. Things pleasant at the time are often unpleasant afterwards, so the verdict on a mouthful can change once it is over.
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?
Lingering sensations appear in dream reports, and the continuity view treats waking bodily experience as tracking into dream content.
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 word left the mouth entirely and now describes the residue of a conversation, an argument or a decision, which is a long way for a word about the tongue.
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?
The meal is over and the mouth is still reporting. Whatever you decide about it now is what you will actually remember.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The part that outlasts its cause.
What are the genre conventions?
A glass put down ten minutes ago, and still there.
How to subvert it
Write the aftertaste that arrives first.
Try this
Two hundred words about an experience continuing after its cause is gone.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.