Dreaming About Eating

What survives from a meal dream is rarely the meal. It is one detail: a taste, the shape of a table, or who sat across from it. Eating has been interpreted for as long as dreams have been written down as taking something in, and the reading turns on what was taken, in whose company, and whether the dreamer was left satisfied.

Alone, or at somebody else's table

The company is treated as more telling than the food. A meal shared with others is generally taken as belonging, and older collections make a great deal of who serves whom. Eating by yourself is not automatically bleak in that tradition; it appears in some sources as self-sufficiency and in others as isolation, with the mood of the dream separating them. Being fed by somebody, and being unable to eat while everyone around you does, are the two versions raised most often.

When the food is wrong

Spoiled food, food that will not go down, a plate that empties as you look at it, or a mouth too full to speak: these variants have their own small literature. The common thread is not the food but the failure of an ordinary process, and they tend to be interpreted as something being harder to accept than it should be. Chewing without swallowing appears in several sources as turning a matter over without resolving it.

The plainer explanation

Appetite has a physical side and it does not switch off at bedtime. People eat in their sleep when they are hungry, when they are dieting, during a fast, in pregnancy, and after a very late or very heavy meal. Anybody who has gone to bed hungry knows this dream without needing a symbol for it. That does not cancel the traditional reading, but it belongs in the same paragraph, and your own relationship with food will shape the dream far more than a general entry can.