Quinoa in a dream: what does it mean?
A seed treated as a grain, coated in a bitter compound that has to be washed off before anybody can eat 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 required washing. A food that arrives with something on it that must be removed first builds a small ritual into the eating, and he would ask what the dreamer had to clean before using.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the coating is what protected the crop. Birds leave it alone because of the bitterness, so the thing that has to be removed is the reason there is anything to remove it from.
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 in dream reports and continuity research finds it following waking diet closely, with newly adopted foods appearing as they become habitual.
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?
The saponin coating tastes bitter and foams in water, and it kept the crop safe from birds on the altiplano for a very long time before anybody exported it.
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?
The bitter coating is why the birds left it alone. Everything that makes it annoying is why there is a crop at all.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Protected by exactly the thing that has to be washed away.
What are the genre conventions?
Cloudy water running off, rinsed twice, and a faint foam.
How to subvert it
Write it unwashed.
Try this
Two hundred words about a defence that has to be removed before the thing it defended is any use.
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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