Wine list in a dream: what does it mean?
A document handed to one person at a table, on which the second cheapest entry sells more than the cheapest for reasons that have nothing to do with wine.
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 is given it. One person at the table receives it and the others do not, and he would ask what authority the dreamer was handed without asking for it.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the visible price. What somebody orders is a statement everybody at the table can price, which makes the choice social before it is a matter of taste.
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?
Social judgement and being observed appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records such self-consciousness among persistent themes.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., Dreaming 13(4), 2003, 211-235.What do myth and folklore say?
The second cheapest bottle is widely held in the trade to outsell the cheapest, on the reasoning that nobody wants to be seen taking the bottom line.
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?
Almost nobody orders the cheapest one. Everybody knows why, and the list is printed in the knowledge that they will not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A choice everybody at the table can price.
What are the genre conventions?
A heavy folder handed to one person, and four others waiting.
How to subvert it
Write the wine list with one wine on it.
Try this
Two hundred words about a decision made in front of witnesses.
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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