ABSTRACT
The shared preparation and eating of food is a theme that often turns up in dreams brought into groups. The preparation, consumption and digestion of food immediately seem to express many of the participants’ expectations symbolically in regard to the group’s implicit goals. In other words, there is a mixing of everyone’s ingredients, stories, fantasies, characters and dreams. What happens is that this raw material is cooked up and transformed, and the resulting concoction contains everyone’s projected expectations for nourishment and regeneration. In any case, the nature of the foods often depends upon the circumstances themselves. Food is the figurative expression of what the participants have brought in from among their emotions, feelings and moods. It is the job of the therapists to bring all of this together and make it palatable as nourishment, as happens in this dream.
