Yarrow in a dream: what does it mean?
A roadside plant with feathery leaves used to stop bleeding for as long as anyone has written anything down, and used for telling fortunes.
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 double use. A plant that stanches a wound and also answers a question about the future is doing two unrelated jobs, and he would ask which one the dreamer went to it for.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the divination uses the stalks rather than the flower. The plant is cut up and cast, so the answer comes from the arrangement rather than from anything the plant is.
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?
Injury and bleeding appear in dream reports, and content analysis records physical harm among the more emotionally weighted elements, occurring less often than the strength of such memories suggests.
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?
Achilles is said to have used it on his soldiers' wounds, which gives it the name Achillea, and yarrow stalks were the traditional means of consulting the I Ching.
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?
The same plant staunched Greek battlefield wounds and was cast in bundles to consult a Chinese oracle. Nobody arranged that.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
One plant doing two jobs with nothing in common.
What are the genre conventions?
Feathery leaves at a verge, a cut packed with them, and stalks thrown.
How to subvert it
Write the divination being right.
Try this
Two hundred words about something used for two purposes that have no relation to each other.
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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