Dreaming of fermentation : what can this symbol evoke?

What resembles a loss

At first glance nothing distinguishes a dough that is rising from one that is spoiling : in both cases something invisible consumes the matter and transforms it. Only what follows makes the difference, and one must wait to know which one has.

Dreams often use this figure for periods whose product is not yet known. A questioning, a crisis in a couple, a working life coming apart : something is working, the present state is unpleasant, and nothing yet indicates the result.

The question it poses is not reassuring but it is fair : is what seems to be spoiling turning, or ripening? Nobody can say during, and that is precisely what the dream stages.

One must close and wait

Fermentation happens only in shelter : in a closed vat, under a cloth, in a cellar. Opening too often to check stops the process — curiosity is here exactly what prevents.

The alchemists made a rule of this : their vessel had to stay sealed, and the work spoiled if opened before term. It is the same structure as mourning, learning or convalescence — processes that require one to stop watching them.

What to remember is your gesture in the dream. Opening, waiting, or closing again tell three different relations to what works in you without you — and impatience is the commonest form.

What is working changes the reading

• A dough swelling — a process under way whose result is not yet legible.
• A strong, uncertain smell — what is transforming, and cannot yet be named.
• Opening to check — curiosity interrupting exactly what it meant to watch.
• A sealed vat left alone — patience, here the hardest and most effective gesture.
• Something that really has spoiled — the other outcome, real, which the dream does not hide.
• A starter kept from one time to the next — what remains of a transformation and allows the following one.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Jung took a great interest in alchemical operations as descriptions of inner processes, and fermentation holds a precise place there : it follows decomposition and precedes the new form. He stressed the necessity of the closed vessel, that is, of a frame that contains without inspection. Other readings retain the phenomenon's ambiguity, where rotting and ripening resemble each other until one has waited.