Harebell in a dream: what does it mean?
A slender blue flower that is the Scottish bluebell, and is a completely different plant from the English one.
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 two nations using one name for two plants. A word that means different things a few hundred miles apart cannot be relied on, and he would ask what the dreamer had agreed with somebody without agreeing at all.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it flowers on poor thin ground. It grows where almost nothing else bothers, so the delicacy is a survivor's rather than a sheltered thing's.
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?
Plants appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds local wild flowers occurring most for people who walk where they grow.
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?
The English bluebell carpets woodland in spring and this flowers on dry banks in late summer, so two people using the word are also describing two different seasons.
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?
Two people saying bluebell can mean different plants, different habitats and different months, and neither of them is wrong.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
One word covering two things in two countries.
What are the genre conventions?
A thin blue bell on a dry bank in August, moving in nothing.
How to subvert it
Write them side by side.
Try this
Two hundred words about two people agreeing on a word and meaning entirely different things.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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.