Phlox in a dream: what does it mean?
A garden flower whose name is the Greek word for flame, given for the colour rather than for anything it does.
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 fire as a description of colour. A word for burning applied to something that does not burn is a transfer everybody accepts, and he would ask what the dreamer described in terms of something it is not.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the scent comes in the evening. It strengthens as the light goes, so the plant named for flame does its real work after dark.
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 cultivated flowers occurring most for the people who grow them.
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?
Phlox is flame in Greek and was applied to a plant with no heat in it at all, which is how most colour words in botany were arrived at.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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?
It is named after fire and does its best work in the dark, when the scent comes up and the colour has gone.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A word for burning given to something that does not.
What are the genre conventions?
A border going over at dusk, and a smell arriving as the colour leaves.
How to subvert it
Write it in full sun.
Try this
Two hundred words about something named for one quality that does its real work when that quality is gone.
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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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