Molasses in a dream: what does it mean?
The thick dark syrup left when sugar is refined out of cane, which is the part that was not wanted and turned out to be useful.
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 residue. A by-product that acquired its own value was defined for a long time by what had been taken out of it, and he would ask what the dreamer had discarded and then used.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the slowness. It is the standard image for something moving reluctantly, and the phrase does not need explaining to anybody who has poured it.
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 culinary content following the dreamer's actual habits rather than carrying independent meaning.
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 storage tank burst in Boston in 1919 and released a wave of it through the streets that killed twenty one people, and the case that followed established real liability for the company.
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?
A tank of it burst in Boston and the wave killed twenty one people. Slowness is not the same as harmlessness.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The leftover part that turned out to be the useful one.
What are the genre conventions?
A dark pour that will not hurry, and a spoon standing up in it.
How to subvert it
Write it moving fast.
Try this
Two hundred words about a by-product nobody wanted that outlived the thing it was left over from.
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.