Delphinium in a dream: what does it mean?
A tall blue spike named for the dolphin its unopened bud was thought to resemble, and poisonous from root to seed.
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 height and the toxicity together. A plant grown to stand above everything in a border while being dangerous to eat combines display and threat, and he would ask what the dreamer admired and kept away from.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it needs staking. The height it is grown for is more than the stem can hold, so the whole effect depends on something invisible pushed into the ground behind it.
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?
Gardens and plants appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds cultivated settings occurring most for people who tend 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?
Delphis is a dolphin, and the resemblance is in the unopened bud rather than the flower, so the name records a stage almost nobody looks at.
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 name comes from the shape of the bud, not the flower. It is named after the stage everybody walks past.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
An effect that depends on a hidden support.
What are the genre conventions?
A six-foot blue spike, and a cane behind it nobody is meant to see.
How to subvert it
Write it unstaked in a gale.
Try this
Two hundred words about a height that only exists because of something pushed into the ground behind it.
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.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.