Bay tree in a dream: what does it mean?
The tree the laurel wreath comes from and the leaf that goes into a stew, which is a genuinely odd double life for one plant.
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 probably be more interested in the wreath than the tree, since a dream that hands somebody a token of victory raises the question of whose approval the dreamer is short of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might find the double use worth staying with, since the same plant marks the highest public honour and sits in a pot by a back door. It would resist choosing between the two.
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?
Gardeners and cooks dream of the plants they handle. A bay tree in a dream is more likely to have come from a pot by a kitchen door than from anything about honour, and the ordinary route is worth checking first.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
The laurel is sacred to Apollo, and the story attached to it is not a happy one: Daphne is turned into the tree while fleeing him, and he takes the leaves as his emblem afterwards. The victor's wreath carries that origin whether or not anybody wearing one has been told it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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?
Resting on laurels is so worn that the tree itself has become hard to see. The way back is the kitchen: the leaf that goes in whole and is fished out at the end.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The honour that began as an escape.
What are the genre conventions?
Wreaths, Roman emperors, and a metaphor about complacency.
How to subvert it
Write it as the thing somebody waters, badly, in a pot that is too small.
Try this
Two hundred words in which somebody is given a wreath and does not want 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.
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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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