Cornflower in a dream: what does it mean?
A blue weed of cornfields that was so common it named the colour, and that herbicides nearly removed from the country entirely.
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 it being a weed. A plant valued now and eradicated as a nuisance within living memory changed category without changing at all, and he would ask what the dreamer's opinion had reversed on.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it belonged to the crop rather than the wild. It grew where people had ploughed, so removing it required a deliberate effort against something people had themselves created conditions for.
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?
Familiar plants recur in dream reports in proportion to waking contact, and continuity research finds agricultural landscapes appearing in the dreams of people who have lived in them.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
It was a serious arable weed and was cleared out of the fields almost completely, and it survives now mostly where it is sown deliberately in seed mixes for the look of it.
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?
It was destroyed as a weed and is now sown on purpose for the look of it. Same plant, opposite policy, one lifetime.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The thing eradicated and then replanted by the same people.
What are the genre conventions?
Blue in standing corn, and a sprayer going down the tramline.
How to subvert it
Write the farmer who left a headland.
Try this
Two hundred words about something removed at expense and then reintroduced at expense.
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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