DREAM GALAXY

Literary dream · Nature & weather

Roses at the open bay window

Domestic garden and neighboring house · Date unknown · literary dream-story

It is getting very dark now, and I have been sitting at my open bay window ever since sundown. How fresh and sweet the evening air is, as it comes up from my little flower garden below, laden with the fragrance of June roses and almond blossom! Ah, by the way, I will send over some more of those same roses to my opposite neighbor tomorrow morning,--and there is a beautiful spray of white jasmin nodding in at the casement now, and only waiting to be gathered for him. Poor old man! He must be very lonely and quiet, lying there day after day in his dark little bed-chamber, with no companions save his books and his old housekeeper.

Original text — Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part II: Dream-Stories, Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland

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Source
Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part II: Dream-Stories — Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland, posthumous edition (1908 Project Gutenberg source edition). Part II, VI. The Little Old Man's Story
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Literary dream
Place
Domestic garden and neighboring house · British
Date
Date unknown · literary dream-story
Uncertainty
Low — Literary story from Part II; the excerpt is dialogue within the story, not a diary record. Its composition date is unknown.
Imagery
Garden · Flower · House · Book · Darkness
Feelings
Loneliness · Tenderness · Calm

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

Garden

Whose garden was it? Was it tended or overgrown, and could you leave?

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

The first garden is a place of ease and of loss: God plants a garden eastward in Eden and puts the man in it, and the man and woman later hide “amongst the trees of the garden” when they hear God walking there.

Genesis 2:8; 3:8 (King James Version)

Chinese opera Literature

In “The Peony Pavilion” the young Du Liniang walks into her family’s garden, sighs “So all this riot of colour blooms for nothing but ruined wells and broken walls”, and falls asleep. In the dream that follows she meets her lover.

Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion, scene 10 “Startled Dream”

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Flower

What flower was it? Did someone give it to you, plant it, or did it simply appear? Was it opening or fading?

Jung · The golden flower

Jung wrote a commentary on the Chinese inner-alchemy text The Secret of the Golden Flower, reading its flower as an image of a centre. It is his reading of a Daoist text through his own framework, not the text’s own meaning.

C. G. Jung, “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower”, Collected Works 13

Chinese drama Literature

In The Peony Pavilion, Du Liniang falls asleep after walking in a spring garden and dreams of a young scholar among the flowers; the dream love outlasts her waking life.

Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion (1598), “The Interrupted Dream”

English Romantic poetry Literature

Coleridge asked what it would mean to pass through Paradise in a dream, be given a flower as a pledge, and wake with the flower in your hand.

S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae (1895)

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House

Whose house was it — one you know, or one you only know in the dream? Which room did you spend the most time in?

Jung · The house as psyche

In 1909 Jung dreamed of a house whose cellar led down into older and older layers — Roman, then prehistoric. He later took it as an image of the psyche, with the oldest layers at the bottom.

C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

Phenomenology Philosophy

Gaston Bachelard argued that the house “shelters daydreaming”: the attic and cellar of a childhood home stay with us as places to imagine from.

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)

Chinese fiction Literature

In chapter 5 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu dreams his way into the Land of Illusion, a palace of cabinets holding registers of the household’s fates.

Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, ch. 5

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Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Dreams that share its images