Orange blossom in a dream: what does it mean?
A flower on a tree that fruits and flowers at once, which is why it was carried by brides for most of two centuries.
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 double state, since a tree carrying blossom and fruit simultaneously is doing two things a person is usually asked to do in sequence.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take promise and result on one branch as a genuinely unusual image, since almost every other symbol of fruition requires the flower to go first.
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?
The scent is used in orange flower water and appears in a great many pastries, so the smell is familiar to people who have never seen the tree. Neroli oil comes from the same flower and is one of the most expensive in perfumery.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
It became the bridal flower in Britain after Victoria wore it in 1840, and the fashion spread so completely that artificial orange blossom was manufactured in quantity for people with no access to the real thing. A royal choice created an industry in fake flowers. Wax, and later celluloid, made by hand in workshops in London and Paris.
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?
Wax orange blossom, kept in a box for fifty years by somebody who could not afford the real thing, is a better object than any bouquet.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The promise and the result on one branch.
What are the genre conventions?
In a veil, in a wedding scene, unremarked.
How to subvert it
Write the workshop making wax flowers by the gross.
Try this
Two hundred words about an imitation kept for half a century. In a box, in tissue, in a drawer.
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.