Rhubarb in a dream: what does it mean?
A vegetable eaten as a fruit, whose leaves will poison you and whose stalks are grown in the dark by candlelight in one small corner of Yorkshire.
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 a plant that is half edible and half dangerous, since a thing that must be divided correctly before it can be enjoyed is a shape he found useful well beyond the kitchen.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take forcing as the material rather than the plant: a crop grown in total darkness, in heated sheds, so that it produces early and tender. It would ask what the dreamer had been made to produce ahead of time.
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?
The leaves contain oxalic acid and are genuinely toxic, which is worth stating plainly since the plant is common in gardens and the stalks are perfectly safe. A dreamer processing a warning heard in childhood is dreaming the warning as much as the plant.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Forced rhubarb is grown in sheds so dark that the crop is picked by candlelight, and in the quiet you can hear the stalks creak as they grow. The area between Wakefield, Leeds and Morley was once called the Rhubarb Triangle and supplied most of the world.
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 audible growing is one of the best facts available to a writer. A dark shed, a candle, and a sound like something small being opened.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The thing brought on early by being kept in the dark.
What are the genre conventions?
A crumble, an allotment, and a joke about how much of it there is.
How to subvert it
Write the forcing shed at night, and the pickers who work by candle because light would spoil it.
Try this
Two hundred words in a dark room where something is growing audibly.
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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