Fly trap in a dream: what does it mean?
A plant that eats animals, which reverses the arrangement so completely that Darwin spent sixteen years on 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 something that closes only when touched twice, since a trap requiring confirmation before it springs is a more deliberate object than one that simply shuts.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take an inversion of the usual order as the material rather than the plant, and would ask what in the dreamer's world had started behaving as its opposite.
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?
This is a shop-bought plant for most people, kept on a windowsill and usually dead within a season, so the dream tends to arrive with a specific kitchen rather than a swamp. The gap between the reputation and the sad thing on the sill is often the point.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
The Venus flytrap grows wild in a small area of coastal North and South Carolina and nowhere else on earth. It counts: a hair must be touched twice within about twenty seconds before the trap closes, which stops it wasting a snap on a raindrop. Each trap can only close a handful of times before it dies, so the counting is not fussiness but budgeting.
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?
The counting is the detail worth having, because it makes the plant seem to be paying attention, which is exactly the wrong thing for a plant to be doing.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The thing that waits and can tell the difference.
What are the genre conventions?
Oversized and hungry, in a greenhouse, in something for children.
How to subvert it
Write the real plant: four inches tall, fussy about water, and rare.
Try this
Two hundred words about something that can count to two.
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.