Feast in a dream: what does it mean?
A meal too large for its occasion, which is the point, since the excess is what marks the day as different.
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 who is at the table and who is not, since a gathering that includes everybody except one person has said something the dreamer may not have been willing to say awake.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take abundance shared rather than hoarded as the material, and would notice whether the dreamer was serving, eating, or watching from the edge of the room.
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 dreams turn up more in people who are restricting what they eat, and a feast in particular is commonly reported during dieting or fasting. That is worth checking before anything symbolic, because the explanation is usually sitting in the kitchen.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
The feast at which something goes badly wrong is one of the most durable structures in European storytelling, from the uninvited guest at a christening to the hall in which hospitality is broken. Irish and Norse tradition both treat a violated feast as among the worst things a host can do, worse than open violence.
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 empty chair does more work than the groaning table, and the reader will do most of it for you if you simply mention it once.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The abundance that exposes who was not asked.
What are the genre conventions?
Long table, candles, and an interruption before dessert.
How to subvert it
Write the clearing up, at one in the morning, by two people.
Try this
Two hundred words at a feast where somebody has not arrived.
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.
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