Cloying in a dream: what does it mean?
Sweetness that has gone past the point of being wanted, which is a taste turning into its opposite without changing.
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 turn. The same thing that was pleasant becomes unbearable with no change in it, and he would ask what the dreamer has had too much of without noticing.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note where else the word goes. Kindness, sentiment and praise are all described this way, so the pattern is not about food at all.
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?
Excess and its discomfort appear in dream reports, and content analysis records eating and its consequences 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?
To cloy once meant to nail or to clog, so the word originally described something being blocked up rather than something being too sweet.
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 has not changed. You have, and there is no way back to the mouthful before the one that was too many.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A pleasure that turned without changing.
What are the genre conventions?
The fourth piece, and no appetite for a fifth.
How to subvert it
Write the cloying thing that never palls.
Try this
Two hundred words about too much of something that was right.
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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