Petunia in a dream: what does it mean?
A bedding plant closely related to tobacco and to the tomato, which is not obvious from anything about 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 family being invisible. A relation that nothing in the appearance suggests was found by looking at structure rather than at surface, and he would ask what connection the dreamer had missed.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the whole family is chemically active. Nightshades run from dinner to poison to a drug, and the ornamental one is the member that does nothing at all.
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 continuity research finds bedding displays occurring most for people who plant 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?
Petun was a name for tobacco, and the plant is in the same family as the potato, the tomato, the aubergine and deadly nightshade, all of which look nothing like each other.
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 potato, the tomato, the aubergine, tobacco and deadly nightshade are one family, and none of them looks like any of the others.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A relation that nothing on the surface suggests.
What are the genre conventions?
A window box, and a family tree nobody in it would recognise.
How to subvert it
Write the resemblance visible.
Try this
Two hundred words about relatives who have nothing whatever in common to look at.
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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