Lozenge in a dream: what does it mean?
A sweet sold as a medicine, which is a category confusion the object has profited from for two centuries.
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 something taken for comfort while being described as treatment, since the gap between what a person says they are doing and what they are doing was most of his subject.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a small ritual of self-care performed during illness as worth noticing, since the ritual often matters more to the person than the remedy does.
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?
Being unwell genuinely changes dream content, and people report more unpleasant and more vivid dreams during fever and infection. A dream featuring medicine is worth checking against how the dreamer actually felt that night.
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 word is a shape before it is a sweet: a diamond in heraldry, where a lozenge rather than a shield was used to display the arms of a woman. The confectionery took the name from the shape it was cut into. Which is why a cough sweet and a coat of arms share a word for no other reason.
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 tin is better than the sweet. A dented tin in a coat pocket, rattling, belonging to somebody who always has one.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The comfort dressed as a cure.
What are the genre conventions?
Offered in a waiting room, or sucked loudly during a performance.
How to subvert it
Write the heraldry: a woman's arms on a diamond because she may not bear a shield.
Try this
Two hundred words about somebody who always carries them. They offer one before anybody has coughed.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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.