Semolina in a dream: what does it mean?
The coarse middle of durum wheat, left when the flour is sifted out, which turned out to be the useful part.
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 the residue again. A by-product that carries a cuisine rather than the product it was separated from inverts what was being aimed at, and he would ask what the dreamer had sifted out and then needed.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that its coarseness is why it works. Fine flour makes a paste and this makes a dough that holds a shape, so the thing that failed the sieve is what pasta needs.
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 culinary content following the dreamer's real diet and habits rather than symbolism.
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?
Pasta and couscous are both made from it, and its reputation in Britain rests almost entirely on a milk pudding that a generation was made to eat at school.
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 carries two of the great cuisines and a generation of British schoolchildren will only ever associate it with pudding.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The part that failed the sieve and turned out to matter.
What are the genre conventions?
A gritty pale flour, and a dough that holds an edge.
How to subvert it
Write the pudding defended.
Try this
Two hundred words about the leftover part turning out to be what everything was actually for.
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.
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.