Clove in a dream: what does it mean?
A dried flower bud that grew on a handful of islands and nowhere else, which made those islands worth a war.
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 scarcity being geographic. A thing that only exists in one place makes possession of the place the whole of the trade, and he would ask what the dreamer wanted a monopoly on.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the clove is picked before it opens. The bud is harvested while still closed, so the flower the tree was making never happens at all.
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?
Smell and taste are the least reported senses in dream accounts, and content analysis finds them mentioned only rarely and usually when unusually intense.
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?
The Dutch destroyed clove trees outside the islands they controlled in order to hold the trade, and a tree on Ternate was kept alive in defiance of that policy and used to break 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?
The monopoly was broken by seedlings taken from one surviving tree that somebody had refused to cut down.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The bud picked before it can open.
What are the genre conventions?
A nail-shaped spice, an island, and a fleet standing off it.
How to subvert it
Write the person who kept the one tree.
Try this
Two hundred words about a fortune resting entirely on a thing growing in only one place.
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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