Clematis in a dream: what does it mean?
A climber whose seed heads are silver and feathered, giving it the country names traveller's joy and old man's beard.
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 it being named twice for two seasons. A plant called joy in flower and an old man in seed is being described by two people at different times of year, and he would ask which the dreamer had met.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it climbs on other things. It has no rigid stem of its own and gets its height entirely by holding onto whatever is already standing.
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 hedgerow species occurring most for people who pass them regularly.
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 leaf stalks twist round a support rather than the plant producing tendrils, so it climbs with the part of itself that is holding the leaves up.
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?
It climbs with its leaf stalks. The same parts holding the leaves out are the ones gripping the hedge.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Named twice, by people who met it in different months.
What are the genre conventions?
Silver seed heads in a bare hedge in January, catching the light.
How to subvert it
Write it self-supporting.
Try this
Two hundred words about a thing that has two names because two people met it at different times of year.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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