Speedwell in a dream: what does it mean?
A tiny blue roadside flower whose petals fall almost as soon as it is picked, and whose name is a farewell.
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 being a goodbye. A flower called speed you well and known for dropping the moment it is taken is saying farewell in two ways at once, and he would ask what the dreamer could not carry away.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it cannot be kept. Picking it destroys it within minutes, so the only way to have it is to leave it where it is and go back.
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 roadside and verge species occurring most for people who walk past 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?
The country name relates to wishing a traveller well, and the flowers shatter within minutes of picking, so children learn early that this one cannot be brought home.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
Pick it and it is bare stems before you reach the door. Every child learns that one exactly once.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A thing that can only be had by leaving it there.
What are the genre conventions?
Bright blue on a verge, and a bare green stalk in a fist.
How to subvert it
Write it lasting a week in water.
Try this
Two hundred words about something that can only be kept by not taking 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.
-
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.
-
The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. 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.