Food

There is food for the mind, food for thought, food for the body and spiritual nourishment. We can digest information or experience, the latter being food for our growth as an individual. Food can represent any of these. Something you might take or are taking into yourself – such as experience of a relationship – qualities of another person – sexual pleasure – social pleasure. The dream might also be a warning about health in regard to what is eaten. So eating strange things can suggest you are taking that into yourself and digesting it – learning from it or absorbing it.

Food can also indicate your hunger for warmth, love, attention – anything you are hungry for. Sometimes pain from childhood underlies the hunger. The hunger may be for understanding or experience that brings peace.

If the food is connected with another person, it may say you are carrying from the relationship with them something that nourishes you or feeds your hunger. See: Eating; Restaurant; Salad.

Idioms: Food for thought; junk food; food of the gods.

Useful questions:

What is being eaten and what do I feel about that or associate with it?

What feelings were in the dream connected with food?

What am I hungry for at the moment?

What has satisfied my needs lately?

A meal Taking in life; absorbing something of life and the world; being enriched. If you are with others, then it might reflect something about the way you relate socially to others. It could also be a sharing of life and experience with others.

Sharing a meal: Sharing sustenance with others. In the ritual of the mass, it shows the recognition of sharing life with all others – being sustained by the flow of life as substance and energy.

Being sick from eating something: See: vomit.

Food in connection with a particular person: Being nourished by or hungry for relationship with them; enjoyment of sexuality with them.

Frequent dreams about eating: Suggesting a great hunger for something; perhaps a compensation for dieting or problems with eating.

Giving food: Giving of oneself, time, love, work, sex.

Stealing food: Dishonest about needs in a relationship; feelings of being parasite.

Not having enough food: A real need for some sort of nourishment. It could be for mental, emotional or physical needs. It could relate to childhood needs of not getting enough – mother’s breast, attention, love.

apple Temptation and the Garden of Eden. This links it with the fruits of ones action, or the consequences of action, the fruit of ones labour; pleasure; food or sustenance.

berries

biscuit Pleasure, perhaps connected with childhood. If you are making the biscuits, it might suggest caring for your own needs or those of other people.

bread Experience; everyday life. Given slice of bread: Sex; generosity.

cake Sensual enjoyment.

carrot Sometimes represents the penis. It can also depict what you have to pull out of yourself through hard work, or ‘digging’. Promise of reward, as used with Donkey.

fruits Fruits of experience or effort and what emerges from them.

Soft or luscious fruits such as fig or peach: May represent female genitals.

Long fruit such as banana: May depict male sexuality.

Apple: Temptation; breast.

Grapes: Because grapes can be used to make alcohol, they often have a special significance, and are very ancient cultural symbols. They depict fruitfulness, fertility, but perhaps fruitfulness of a spiritual kind. So a woman dreaming of them, especially near her belly can assume she is pregnant. But they also signify pleasures of the world, drinking, sex, wealth, and conversely, in Christianity they signify the blood of Christ. That means the essence of human experience. The collective human wisdom.

Lemon: Possibly symbolises the feelings of bitterness, sourness. In some nations the lemon also has strong associations with health, so it might show a suggestion to use for your health.

Pineapple: Fruitfulness of soul. Quality or royalty. Self confidence. Prickly exterior.

jam In a mess, a sticky situation. Conserved ideas. Fruits of labour. Pleasure, perhaps childhood pleasure or feelings.

jelly or jello Indecision through anxiety; feeling uncertain about oneself perhaps through lacking a firm identity; something difficult to grasp or feel certain about; potential that can be shaped by one motivations and decisions.

Eating jelly: Taking in feelings of uncertainty or something that can be shaped, something that has potential.

meals Social pleasure; acceptance; social intercourse. If alone: Independence; loss of family ties; lack of social relationships or outside stimulus.

meat - Physical or worldly satisfaction or needs; the best bit of life; nourishing; good fortune or good hunting in ones endeavours; sometimes refers to sexual behaviour, suggesting it is lacking anything but a physical dimension.

If you are a vegetarian: Something to be avoided; feelings of guilt; death.

raw meat: instinctive or powerful emotions or drives; Quoted from Dreams and Dreaming by Norman Mackenzie. ‘It was found that some themes not only appeared in widely separated cultures, but that they also evoked very similar responses. C. G. Siligman, for instance, found that dreams about raw meat occurred in Ireland, Switzerland, China, Greece, the Ukraine, Nigeria, Tanganyika, Borneo, and Achin in Sumatra – and that in all these places such a dream was associated with some impending misfortune. In the Ukraine it presaged a burial; in the Zungeru district if Nigeria, the death of a friend; in Tanganyika, it was a symbol of a funeral feast. The origins of this common belief may be simple: for many poor societies, the consumption of large quantities of meat would be limited to funerals and similar occasions, and the association would therefore be direct.’ Mention different meats such as bacon, beef etc. ***

milk Self-giving; baby needs.

olive - Peace; kindness, because the oil can be pressed from the olive.

salad Sometimes a direct reference to the body’s need for such foods; lack of meaty – sexual – experience. Taking in feelings and influences that are alive and create personal growth. The living growing things in you; simple ways of nourishing yourself. If you are dieting it might have a message connected with food choices.

soup This might be sustenance, sustaining or strengthening emotions. But it depends what is happening to the soup. If spilt it can suggests making a mess of things, or feeling insecure about a social event. Offering soup depicts a giving of yourself, of your care and affection. The soup in a saucepan might be showing how you have gathered many things together to nourish yourself or someone else.

sweets Sensual pleasure; pleasures in life; special love.

Example: ‘A lot of sweets, brightly wrapped, were being put into my open hands. All I saw of the giver were his hands. Beautiful, big, gnarled hands of a working man.’ Alex U.

Alex saw the hands as the holiness of everyday human experience, especially regarding self-giving, as in parenthood, love and work – the hands of Christ that we usually forget. Alex doesn’t eat sweets, so they represent pleasures he seldom allows himself, the pleasure of everyday life and love .

vegetables Basic needs; material satisfaction. If long as carrot: Male sexuality. If a woman’s dream – feelings about sex with male. If male dream – his own sexuality. Onion: Something to cry about; also the different layers of oneself – inner self, outer self.

See: eating