Wassail in a dream: what does it mean?
Drinking and singing to the health of a household or an orchard, from a phrase that simply means be healthy, said as a toast and answered.
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 requirement for an answer. The greeting only works if it is returned, and he would ask what the dreamer said that needed a reply to be complete.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the orchard version. Trees are sung to, toasted and sometimes shot over, which treats a crop as an audience rather than as a possession.
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?
Gatherings and shared drinking appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such social settings among frequent reported dream content.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Wes hal is Old English for be healthy, and the correct answer was drinc hal, so the word we now shout is one half of a two-part exchange.
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?
It is half of a sentence. Somebody said be healthy and somebody was supposed to answer drink healthy, and only the first half survived.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A greeting that needs to be answered to be finished.
What are the genre conventions?
A bowl carried between houses, and cider poured on the roots of a tree.
How to subvert it
Write the wassail nobody answers.
Try this
Two hundred words about half of an exchange surviving on its own.
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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