Bile in a dream: what does it mean?
The bitter fluid the liver makes to break down fat, and the substance two of the four humours were named after.
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 vocabulary. English keeps bilious, galling and embittered as words for temperament, and he would treat a language that names moods after a digestive fluid as worth examining.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the humoral scheme assigned a personality to each fluid, and that the scheme persisted for eighteen hundred years because it gave people a way to name a disposition.
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?
Bodily processes during sleep can be incorporated into dream content, and the incorporation literature finds digestive and internal states reported much less reliably than external stimuli.
Our summary of the incorporation literature. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Black bile and yellow bile were two of Galen's four humours, giving melancholy and choler, and the words survive in English long after the physiology was abandoned.
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?
The physiology was wrong and the vocabulary won anyway. English still describes people by a fluid that does not do what anyone thought.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The temperament named after a digestive fluid.
What are the genre conventions?
A bitter taste, a bad mood, and an old word for both.
How to subvert it
Write someone diagnosed by humour, correctly, by accident.
Try this
Two hundred words about a theory that was abandoned entirely and left its whole vocabulary behind.
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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