Hops in a dream: what does it mean?
A bitter flower grown to preserve beer rather than to flavour it, and the reason whole counties smelled of it for six weeks a year.
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 probably attend to the work rather than the plant, since hop picking was a mass seasonal migration and a dream of it usually carries a crowd.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a bitter thing added to make something else keep as an image worth sitting with, and would ask what the dreamer was preserving.
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?
Hop pillows have been used as a sleep remedy for a long time and there is some evidence behind the sedative effect, though the smell alone will do a good deal. A dreamer sleeping on one has a plausible physical route into the dream.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Hop picking took tens of thousands of families from the East End of London to Kent every September into the 1950s, and it was widely described as the only holiday those families ever had. The work was hard, the pay poor, and people remembered it fondly for the rest of their lives. Whole streets went together and the same families returned to the same farms for generations.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.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?
The hopping holiday is one of the great underwritten English subjects: a working migration that everybody involved insisted was a treat.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The bitterness added so the good thing lasts.
What are the genre conventions?
A rural idyll, or a brewery tour.
How to subvert it
Write the huts, the shared tap, and why they went back every year.
Try this
Two hundred words in a hop field in September.
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.
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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.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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