Potted plant in a dream: what does it mean?
A living thing kept indoors entirely at the owner's discretion, which is why so many of them die of attention rather than neglect.
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 a dependent that cannot ask for anything, since a plant gives no signal until it is already in trouble and the owner is obliged to guess.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take something kept alive purely because somebody decided to as the material, and would ask how the dream plant was doing.
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?
Overwatering kills more houseplants than drought, because roots in a pot with no drainage sit in water and rot. The commonest cause of death is somebody trying harder.
Our summary of the continuity position. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
The aspidistra survived Victorian parlours specifically because it tolerated gas lighting, coal smoke and darkness, which killed everything else. It became a symbol of dull respectability because it was the only plant that could live in those rooms. Orwell used it as the title of a novel about exactly that.
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?
A plant surviving because it could tolerate coal smoke, and then being mocked for dullness, is a small perfect injustice.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The dependent that cannot ask. And gives no signal until it is too late.
What are the genre conventions?
Dead on a windowsill, to show a life falling apart. Brown at the edges and still watered.
How to subvert it
Write somebody killing one with kindness, weekly, for a year. They follow the instructions on the label exactly.
Try this
Two hundred words about harming something by trying too hard. The instructions said once a week.
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.