Asparagus in a dream: what does it mean?
A vegetable with a very short season and a well-known effect on the smell of urine, which is the fact most dreamers actually know about it.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would have something to say about the shape and it is not difficult to guess. It is worth recording that he would, and worth saying that the reading tells you more about his method than about asparagus.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would more likely take the season than the shape, since a food available for six weeks a year sits naturally with themes of timing and of things that cannot be had on demand.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Food appears in dreams a good deal less often than dream dictionaries imply, and when a specific vegetable turns up it usually tracks something the dreamer has recently cooked, bought or been served. The obvious explanation is generally the right one.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Asparagus was cultivated and prized in the ancient Mediterranean and the Romans grew it deliberately rather than gathering it wild. Its status as a luxury has been remarkably stable for two thousand years, which very few foods manage.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
Useful precisely because it is seasonal. A character serving it tells the reader the month without anybody mentioning the month.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The brief luxury that has to be caught or waited a year for.
What are the genre conventions?
Shorthand for a certain kind of dinner party and a certain kind of host.
How to subvert it
Have somebody grow it, which takes three years before a single cut.
Try this
Two hundred words about the last meal of a season.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
-
The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.