Ginkgo in a dream: what does it mean?
A tree with no living relatives at all, the last of its entire order, and unchanged in form for a very long time.
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 solitude of it. A species with no relatives anywhere is the end of something rather than a member of anything, and he would ask what the dreamer was the last of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it survived in cultivation. It persisted in temple gardens in China when it had effectively gone from the wild, so a species was carried through by people planting it.
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 actual exposure, and continuity research finds urban and garden trees occurring most for people who pass them daily.
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?
Several stood close to the centre of the Hiroshima blast and put out new growth the following spring, and some of those trees are still there and are marked.
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?
A handful of them survived Hiroshima and leafed the next spring. Several are still standing and are signposted.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The last of an entire line.
What are the genre conventions?
Fan-shaped leaves going gold all at once, and every one falling in a day.
How to subvert it
Write it with relatives.
Try this
Two hundred words about the only remaining member of something, kept alive by people planting 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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