Kale in a dream: what does it mean?
A hardy brassica that survives frost and was for centuries the vegetable that got people through the winter.
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 it being what was left. A food eaten because nothing else would grow carries the memory of scarcity, and he would ask what the dreamer had lived on and later stopped mentioning.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that frost improves it. The cold that kills the rest of the garden converts starch to sugar in kale, so the hard weather is what makes it worth eating.
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 appears frequently in dream reports, and continuity research finds diet and seasonal availability reflected in dream content rather than symbolism.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
A Scots kailyard was the kitchen garden itself, and the word came to name a whole school of sentimental writing about village life, which its critics used as an insult.
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 word for the vegetable patch became the name of a literary movement, used mostly as an insult.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Improved by exactly the weather that kills everything else.
What are the genre conventions?
A frosted row still standing when the rest of the plot is bare.
How to subvert it
Write it as a luxury.
Try this
Two hundred words about the food that was there when nothing else was, remembered without affection.
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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