Cinnamon in a dream: what does it mean?
A bark traded across the world for centuries at enormous prices, protected by stories its sellers made up about where it came from.
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 invented origin. Sellers who fabricate a dangerous provenance are protecting a margin rather than describing a place, and he would ask what story the dreamer had been sold along with the goods.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the tale put the spice in a bird's nest on a cliff. The image is unforgettable and served entirely to keep buyers from going to look for themselves.
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?
Smell is among the least frequently reported senses in dream accounts, and content analysis finds it noted far less often than sight or sound, generally only when very strong.
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?
Herodotus records that cinnamon was gathered from the nests of great birds on unreachable cliffs, and the phoenix was said to build its pyre of it. The traders knew perfectly well where it grew.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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 traders invented the birds and the cliffs to stop anyone sailing off to find the actual trees. The lie held for centuries.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The story sold alongside the goods.
What are the genre conventions?
Rolled bark, a high price, and a merchant with an excellent tale.
How to subvert it
Write the buyer who goes and looks.
Try this
Two hundred words about a fiction maintained purely to protect a price.
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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.