Nasturtium in a dream: what does it mean?
An edible peppery flower whose name means nose-twister, from what the taste does to the face of anybody eating it.
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 name recording a reaction. A plant named for the expression it produces was described by watching the eater rather than the food, and he would ask how the dreamer's effect on people had become their name.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that everything on it is edible. Flower, leaf and seed are all used, so a plant grown as a decoration is entirely food from top to bottom.
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 and gardens appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds culinary and horticultural content following the dreamer's actual habits.
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?
Nasus tortus is the twisted nose, and the seeds pickled in vinegar were used as a substitute for capers when those could not be got.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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 means twisted nose. Somebody named the plant by watching the face of the person eating it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Named for the expression it causes rather than for itself.
What are the genre conventions?
An orange flower on a salad, and somebody's face changing.
How to subvert it
Write it tasteless.
Try this
Two hundred words about being named after the effect you have rather than anything about you.
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.
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.