Best before in a dream: what does it mean?
A date describing quality rather than safety, which everybody treats as a deadline and which throws away a great deal of 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 authority of a printed number. A judgement is made by a date rather than by a nose, and he would ask what the dreamer stopped assessing for themselves.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that two different labels are read as one. Use by is about safety and best before is about quality, and almost nobody distinguishes them.
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?
Decay and spoilage appear in dream reports, and content analysis records unpleasant conditions more often than pleasant ones.
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?
A great deal of edible food is discarded on the strength of the softer label, which is why several countries have moved to remove it from produce entirely.
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?
Use by is safety and best before is quality. Almost nobody distinguishes them, and a great deal of food is thrown away on the difference.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A printed number replacing a person's judgement.
What are the genre conventions?
A tin turned to read the underside.
How to subvert it
Write the date somebody ignores correctly.
Try this
Two hundred words about trusting a label over your own nose.
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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