Yam in a dream: what does it mean?
A large starchy tuber which in much of the world is a staple and in America is a name given to an entirely different vegetable.
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 borrowed name. A word attached to the wrong plant in one country and never corrected is a small permanent error everybody has agreed to, and he would ask what the dreamer called by a name that was not its own.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the true yam is enormous and the substitute is not. Nothing about the two is similar except a rough role on a plate.
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 tracking the dreamer's actual diet and regional habits rather than functioning symbolically.
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?
Yam festivals mark the start of the harvest across West Africa and are among the most significant events of the year, and the tubers can grow to a size that takes two people to lift.
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?
What is sold as a yam in an American supermarket is a sweet potato. The real thing can weigh more than a child.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A name given to the wrong plant and never taken back.
What are the genre conventions?
A tuber the length of an arm, and a festival for it.
How to subvert it
Write the two side by side.
Try this
Two hundred words about a mistake in naming that everybody knows about and nobody corrects.
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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