Souffle in a dream: what does it mean?
A dish held up entirely by air beaten into egg white, which will collapse and is expected to, and is served fast for that reason.
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 certainty of the fall. It is made in the knowledge that it will not last, and he would ask what the dreamer has built while knowing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note where the structure is. Nothing has been added, air has been trapped, so the substance of it is a arrangement rather than an ingredient.
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?
Things collapsing or failing appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records such failure among persistent dream themes.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
Souffler is to blow, the same root as insufflate, so the name says plainly that the dish is made of breath.
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?
It is falling from the moment it leaves the oven. Everybody at the table knows and everybody hurries anyway.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A structure made of air and known to be temporary.
What are the genre conventions?
An oven door opened too early, and a face.
How to subvert it
Write the souffle that holds all evening.
Try this
Two hundred words about building something you know will fall.
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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