Baobab in a dream: what does it mean?
A tree with a swollen trunk that holds water, hollow enough in some cases that people have used one as a room.
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 storage. A living thing built around holding a reserve for a season that has not arrived is planning made structural, and he would ask what the dreamer was keeping back.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it looks upside down. The bare branches read as roots, and the folk explanations across its range mostly agree that something planted it the wrong way up.
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?
Trees appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds unfamiliar species occurring rarely and generally after an actual encounter or recent account.
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?
Hollow trunks have served as shelters, shops, chapels and in at least one case a lock-up, and the tree goes on living around whatever has been put inside it.
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?
One has been used as a prison. The tree carried on growing around the door and the people inside it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A living thing built around a reserve.
What are the genre conventions?
A trunk the width of a house, and branches like roots in the air.
How to subvert it
Write it planted the right way up.
Try this
Two hundred words about something so large that people started keeping things inside 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.
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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.