Food Can Be a Powerful Metaphor in Dreams, Says Dream Analyst David Rivinus

Orange marmalade was the focal point of an incident that dream analyst, David Rivinus, used to illustrate an unusual phenomenon in dreams. He was referring to what he calls “the waking dream.”

According to Rivinus, in addition to observing our daily lives objectively, we can also see them as the staging arena for subconscious communications. “You can take life literally,” he says. “But you can also see it as a series of symbolic messages.” According to Rivinus, it is especially the unusual or shocking events that are fodder for this kind of communication.

To illustrate his point during a radio interview with Miriam Knight of OM-Times Radio Network, Rivinus told the story of a man who bought three large jars of orange marmalade. Sadly, he tripped as he was entering his kitchen, sending the jars flying out of his hands and smashing onto the ceramic tile kitchen floor. The man subsequently spent hours cleaning up the mess because much of the sticky substance had gotten into the grout between the tiles, and he was obliged to use a toothbrush to get it back out again. In addition, he had to be especially careful because of the broken glass.

“Most of us would have treated this incident as a typical annoyance,” said Rivinus. But he went on to explain that, in this case, he analyzed the marmalade mishap as if it were a dream. Each element of the incident—sticky marmalade, hard kitchen floor, shards of glass—were examined as if they were dream symbols. When the incident was interpreted in this way, the marmalade buyer was startled to discover that it had direct relevance to a current issue in his life.

The symbols told a coherent story. A substance that should have been a delicious treat, ended up creating a “sticky mess” when it crashed into a “hard surface.” This involved a lengthy “cleanup,” with the buyer having to be watchful of dangers: “shards of glass.”

The man had just been to the doctor who had advised him that he needed to “clean up” his diet; he was a prime candidate for Type-2 diabetes. And here, in this “waking dream,” was the same message being delivered in symbolic language. Says Rivinus, “This phenomenon is much more common than we realize.”

For more information on Rivinus and his dream work and dream interpretation, visit www.teacherofdreams.com.