Hollyhock in a dream: what does it mean?
A tall cottage flower that reliably gets rust, which everybody who grows it accepts as part of growing 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 the accepted flaw. A plant grown in the knowledge that it will be diseased by August is being kept in spite of itself, and he would ask what the dreamer put up with as a condition of having something.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it is grown against walls. It needs the shelter and the wall gives it the height, so a plant associated with cottages is really associated with somebody else's masonry.
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?
Gardens and plants appear in dream reports according to real exposure, and continuity research finds domestic horticulture occurring most for people who do it.
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?
Rust arrived and spread through the country within a few decades and has never gone, and gardeners now plant it as a short-lived thing rather than trying to keep a plant clean.
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?
Everybody who grows it knows it will get rust. They plant it anyway and treat the plant as short-lived.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Kept in full knowledge of what will go wrong with it.
What are the genre conventions?
Eight feet against a warm wall, and orange spots on every lower leaf.
How to subvert it
Write a clean one.
Try this
Two hundred words about keeping something you know will fail in exactly the same way every 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.
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.