Acrid in a dream: what does it mean?
The smell that catches at the back of the throat, which is not really a smell at all but the nerves of the face reporting an irritant.
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 involuntary part. The body reacts before the person judges, and he would ask what the dreamer's body decided ahead of them.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the confusion of senses. It is felt rather than smelled, so a word about odour is really describing a small pain.
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?
Choking and difficulty breathing appear in dream reports, and the typical-dreams literature records such bodily distress 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?
Acer in Latin is sharp, the same root as acid and acute, so three quite different kinds of sharpness come from one word.
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 not being smelled. It is being felt, at the back of the throat, and the eyes usually agree before anybody has said anything.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A smell that is actually a small pain.
What are the genre conventions?
Wind changing over a bonfire, and everybody turning away at once.
How to subvert it
Write the acrid smell that is pleasant.
Try this
Two hundred words about the body reacting before you have decided.
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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