Poison in a dream: what does it mean?
A dream that frightens people badly and which almost never means what they fear, though it is worth saying that plainly.
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.
Freud
Freud would attend to something taken in that should not have been, and to who supplied it. He would treat a dream of being poisoned by a named person as being about that person rather than about any substance.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
A Jungian reading might take poison as something absorbed slowly from a situation rather than administered, and would ask what the dreamer had been living inside.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
Dreams of harm are common and are not evidence of intent, toward oneself or anybody else. The content of a dream is not a plan. If dreams of harm or death are frequent, distressing, or arriving alongside low mood, that is worth raising with a doctor, and it is a reasonable and ordinary thing to bring up.
Our summary of the threat-simulation position. See Revonsuo, The reinterpretation of dreams (2000).Mythological
The same word covers venom, which an animal injects, and poison, which is taken in, and English has never fully separated them. A great deal of folklore about poison is really about the fear of being fed by somebody trusted. Which is why tasters existed, and why they were usually somebody's servant rather than a volunteer.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).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.
In literature
The dose is the honest ground. Almost everything is a poison at some quantity, and a character who knows that is a different character from one who thinks in kinds.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
The harm that arrives inside something accepted.
Genre conventions
A goblet, a hesitation, and a switch nobody sees.
How to subvert it
Write the accidental version: a mislabelled bottle in a kitchen.
Try this
Two hundred words about being offered something by somebody you trust.
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.