Posset in a dream: what does it mean?
Hot milk curdled with wine or ale, taken as a remedy and a nightcap, which is the ancestor of every hot drink given to somebody who is unwell.
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 who made it. It was made for somebody, usually by somebody, at the end of a bad day, and he would ask who prepared things for the dreamer.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the double claim. It was food, medicine and a soporific at once, which is what everything was before the three were separated.
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?
Illness and being cared for appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such domestic scenes among ordinary reported dream content.
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?
Special covered pots with a spout were made for drinking the thin part from under the curd, so the vessel survives in collections long after the drink stopped being made.
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 was supper, medicine and a sleeping draught at once, which is what everything was before those became three different shops.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A remedy that was also a kindness.
What are the genre conventions?
A two-handled pot with a spout, warm, carried upstairs.
How to subvert it
Write the posset given to somebody who is well.
Try this
Two hundred words about something that was food and medicine at once.
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.