Dreaming of fat : what can this symbol evoke?

A foresight not decided on

No animal chooses to fatten before winter : the body does it, unknown to its owner, because it learned that food ceases. It is a memory of past famines, inscribed in flesh and not in the head.

Dreams often use this figure for what one keeps out of an old precaution. A prudence inherited from a hard period, an accumulation no longer of use, a way of holding back answering a lack that no longer exists. The body goes on preparing for a winter that already happened.

The question it poses is useful : against what famine are you still protecting yourself? Those who dream of this matter have often known a real lack, sometimes before their memory.

What insulates from outside

Fat does not only nourish : it insulates. Animals of cold seas carry a thick layer, and it is what makes icy water bearable. What separates from outside is also what allows one to stay there.

Dreams sometimes use this dimension, very different from the first. A distance taken from what wounds, an acquired insensitivity allowing one to hold on in a harsh milieu, a thickness between oneself and others, unchosen and genuinely protective.

What to remember is what the layer allowed. Holding on in the cold, or feeling nothing at all : two neighbouring states, which dreams distinguish better than consciousness does.

What the matter does changes the reading

• A store built without one's willing it — an old precaution, answering a past lack.
• A layer insulating from cold — what lets you hold on in a harsh milieu.
• Feeling nothing at all — the neighbouring state, which the dream distinguishes.
• Fat one seeks to remove — a wished-for lightening the body has not yet understood the need for.
• Fat feeding a lamp or a machine — the use that turns what was seizing up.
• A matter that clogs or sticks — the excess preventing instead of protecting.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology takes an interest in protections the body sets up without conscious decision : they answer a real experience, often earlier than memory, and persist long after the situation has changed. It recalls that they are not removed by being judged. Other readings retain the insulating function, which allows one to hold on in a milieu nothing else would make bearable.