Blancmange in a dream: what does it mean?
A set white pudding whose name means white food, which was a dish of chicken and almonds for four hundred years before it became a shape in a mould.
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 name holding still. The word did not change while the dish became something else entirely, and he would ask what the dreamer still calls by an old name.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the colour requirement. White was the whole specification, so the dish was defined by appearance before it was defined by 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?
Food and its appearance appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such sensory detail 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?
The medieval version was pounded chicken with almond milk and sugar, served at grand tables, which is a long way from a rabbit-shaped mould on a child's plate.
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?
For four centuries it had chicken in it. The name never changed and now it means a wobbling pink rabbit.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A name that outlived everything it described.
What are the genre conventions?
A copper mould turned out onto a plate, holding its shape.
How to subvert it
Write the blancmange that is not white.
Try this
Two hundred words about a name that stayed while the thing changed.
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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