Yew in a dream: what does it mean?
A tree that can live for thousands of years, is poisonous in almost every part, and stands in nearly every old churchyard in these islands.
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 attend to the setting rather than the tree, since almost nobody meets a yew anywhere but among graves and the association arrives before the plant does.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would find a great deal here: a tree that is lethal and extremely long-lived, planted deliberately where the dead are, and capable of regenerating from its own collapsed trunk.
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 tree is genuinely poisonous, seeds, leaves and bark, and livestock die from clippings thrown over a wall. It is also the source of a family of chemotherapy drugs, which means the same plant kills cattle and treats cancer.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Many churchyard yews predate the churches beside them, sometimes by a very long way, which suggests the churches were built at sites the trees already marked. A yew can hollow out completely and send a new stem down inside its own shell, so ageing them is genuinely difficult. The Fortingall Yew in Perthshire is estimated at anywhere between two and five thousand years old.
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?
The tree being older than the church is the fact that reorders a scene: the building is a recent arrival at a place that was already important.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The poison that outlives everything around it.
What are the genre conventions?
Dark, in a churchyard, at a funeral.
How to subvert it
Write the drug: bark, a laboratory, and a treatment made from the graveyard tree.
Try this
Two hundred words about something older than the building beside it.
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.