Wisteria in a dream: what does it mean?
A climber that can live for centuries, and which from seed may take twenty years to flower or never flower at all.
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 wait. A plant that may take two decades to do the thing it is grown for asks for a patience most people planting it will not see rewarded, and he would ask what the dreamer had started for somebody else.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that grafted plants flower quickly. A cutting from a plant that already flowers carries the readiness with it, so the shortcut is to take a piece of something that has already waited.
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 long-standing garden features occurring most for people who live with 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?
It can pull the guttering off a house and lift roof tiles given long enough, and the oldest specimens in cultivation are considerably older than the buildings they are growing on.
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?
Grown from seed it may take twenty years to flower. The way round it is to take a cutting from something that has already done the waiting.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A wait that somebody else will collect on.
What are the genre conventions?
A trunk like a rope, a house it is older than, and gutters coming loose.
How to subvert it
Write the seedling that never flowers.
Try this
Two hundred words about planting something whose reward will be somebody else's entirely.
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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