Hydrangea in a dream: what does it mean?
A shrub whose flower colour is decided by the soil rather than by the plant, so the same cutting is blue in one garden and pink in another.
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 colour belonging to the ground. A plant that reports the soil rather than expressing itself is an instrument, and he would ask what the dreamer's appearance was actually measuring.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that a gardener can change it. Adding aluminium or lime moves the colour either way, so the flower can be argued with in a manner very few can.
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 and gardens appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and content analysis finds colour noted mainly when unusual or emphatic rather than routinely.
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?
Acid soil makes aluminium available and the flowers go blue, and lime locks it up and they go pink, so a hedge running along a boundary can change colour halfway.
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 same cutting is blue in one garden and pink next door. The plant is reporting the soil rather than saying anything about itself.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Appearance that is a measurement of the ground.
What are the genre conventions?
One hedge changing colour halfway along, at a boundary.
How to subvert it
Write two identical plants in one bed.
Try this
Two hundred words about somebody whose appearance turns out to be a reading of where they are standing.
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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