Liquorice in a dream: what does it mean?
A root many times sweeter than sugar, chewed as a sweet and used as a medicine, which raises blood pressure if you eat much of it.
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 sweetness that costs something. A treat with a physiological price attached is a pleasure with terms, and he would ask what the dreamer was enjoying against advice.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the taste divides people absolutely. Very few are indifferent to it, and the split has nothing to do with sweetness, which everyone agrees is there.
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?
Taste is among the least frequently reported sensations in dream accounts, and content analysis finds it mentioned only occasionally and usually when strong or strange.
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?
It was grown around Pontefract, where the coins stamped with a castle were made, and monastery gardens across England kept it as a medicinal plant long before it was a confection.
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?
It was a monastery medicine centuries before it was a sweet, and one Yorkshire town still has its castle stamped on the lozenges.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The pleasure with terms attached.
What are the genre conventions?
A black lozenge, a strong taste, and somebody grimacing.
How to subvert it
Write the person who eats far too much of it.
Try this
Two hundred words about a small pleasure that half the room finds unbearable.
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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