Periwinkle in a dream: what does it mean?
A trailing evergreen with blue flowers, planted on graves, and once worn by men on their way to be hanged.
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 garland on the condemned. A flower given to somebody being taken to die is a courtesy inside a killing, and he would ask what the dreamer was being offered along with the worst.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is evergreen and spreads without being planted again. It holds the ground it is put on, which is exactly why it was put on graves.
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?
Cemeteries and burial appear in dream reports, and content analysis finds them occurring more often as settings passed through than as the site of the dream's main event.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
It was called the flower of death in Italy and was woven into garlands for the condemned in mediaeval England, and it was planted over graves because it covers ground and stays green.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Brewer).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?
Men were given a garland of it on the way to the gallows. Somebody thought that was a kindness and perhaps it was.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The courtesy extended inside the worst thing.
What are the genre conventions?
Blue flowers over a grave, and green all winter.
How to subvert it
Write the garland refused.
Try this
Two hundred words about a small kindness offered to somebody in the middle of something unforgivable.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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