Also called dream of me spell, dumb cake, salt cake dream, dream of your future spouse
An old Scottish and English way to dream of a future partner: eat a small salty oatcake or 'dumb cake' in silence before bed, drink nothing, and see who brings you water in your dream. It was done on Halloween, Shrove Tuesday, St Agnes' Eve and Midsummer.
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Take care: Do not use the very high salt amounts of old recipes, and skip this spell if you have high blood pressure or kidney problems or have been told to limit salt. Never eat fish bones. Keep water by the bed.
Kelley wrote that the dumb cake originated on Lewis. Girls each took a little dough mixed with any water but spring water, kneaded it with the left thumb in silence, pricked their initials on it and set it by the fire, then waited at the far end of the room for the future husband's form to come and turn it.
Uses: meal, water
On Halloween a cake of meal and salt, or a salt herring eaten bones and all, brought a dream of someone offering a drink of water. Not a word could be spoken and no water drunk until the dream came.
Uses: salt herring, oatmeal
Shrove Tuesday, Fastern's E'en in Scots, was also called Bannock Nicht. Salty bannocks baked that night were linked to dreaming of a sweetheart, and a ring or token might be baked into one to foretell marriage.
Uses: oat bannock
Rather than eating a salty cake, a young woman went to bed fasting and silent on 20 January to dream of her future husband, the custom John Keats made famous in 'The Eve of St Agnes' (1819).
Silent cakes for dreaming of a lover appear in George Sinclair's 'Satan's Invisible World Discovered' (1685), one of the earliest records. By the 19th century the dumb cake was known in England and Scotland, made by small groups of girls on Halloween, Christmas Eve, St Agnes' Eve or Midsummer. The name likely means 'silent', since one spoken word broke the charm, though some link it to 'doom', fate.
Ruth Edna Kelley's 'The Book of Hallowe'en' (1919) collected the Hebridean versions: the Lewis dumb cake and the salt cake or salt herring that made the dreamer thirsty for a spouse to bring water. The salt is the clever part: a thirsty sleeper dreams of drink, and the person offering it was the one fate had chosen. Treat it as a gentle dream practice, and remember the old forms used far more salt than is safe.
Peel an apple in one unbroken strip, throw it over your shoulder, and read the letter it makes on the floor as the initial of a future partner.
On the night of 20 January, a person goes to bed without supper after a small rite with pins and a prayer, hoping to see a future sweetheart in a dream.
On the night before St Valentine's Day, five bay leaves are pinned to the pillow so you will dream of your sweetheart. It was recorded in a 1755 London magazine, along with an egg-and-salt charm and a paper-in-clay lottery for valentines.
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