Bay leaf in a dream: what does it mean?
The leaf of the laurel, put into food for a flavour most people could not name and taken out again before serving.
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 its removal. An ingredient that must be present and must not be found is doing its work by being taken away, and he would ask what the dreamer had contributed and then withdrawn.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the same leaf crowned poets and generals. The wreath and the stockpot are the same plant, and nothing in the leaf distinguishes the two uses.
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?
Food preparation appears in dream reports, and continuity research finds cooking and domestic routine among the activities most reliably reproduced in the dreams of those who do 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?
Daphne became the laurel escaping Apollo, and he took it as his tree afterwards, which is why victors wore it. The victory wreath is made of a woman who ran.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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 victor's crown is made of a woman who turned into a tree to get away from the god awarding it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The thing that has to be there and must not be found.
What are the genre conventions?
A pot on a low heat, and a leaf fished out at the end.
How to subvert it
Write it left in and somebody biting it.
Try this
Two hundred words about a contribution that only works if it is removed before anyone notices.
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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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