Geranium in a dream: what does it mean?
The plant almost everybody calls a geranium is a pelargonium, and the actual geranium is a modest hardy thing nobody photographs.
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 held by the wrong plant. A word everybody uses confidently for something it does not describe is a settled error, and he would ask what the dreamer was certain of and had backwards.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that both plants get on with it. Neither is inconvenienced by the confusion and only the botanists mind, which is a fair description of most naming disputes.
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 and gardens appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds domestic horticulture occurring most for people who garden.
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?
Geranium means crane's bill, from the shape of the seed pod, and the tender bedding plants sold under the name belong to a separate genus that has never had it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after 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?
The thing in every window box is a pelargonium. The real geranium is a hardy plant that nobody photographs.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A name confidently applied to the wrong thing.
What are the genre conventions?
A red window box, and a botanist declining to say anything.
How to subvert it
Write the correction taking hold.
Try this
Two hundred words about an error so settled that correcting it would only confuse everybody.
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.
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.