Dreams about flower: Jung, traditions and semiotics
This is not a dream dictionary. Each perspective below names where it comes from; traditions are shown side by side, not merged into one meaning.
Start with yourself
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.
Was the flower at the centre of the dream, or off to one side? What grew around it?
C. G. Jung, “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower”, Collected Works 13
Traditions, side by side
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)
Semiotics: how an image comes to mean
Following C. S. Peirce, an image can work as a sign in three ways:
- Icon — by resemblance
Does the flower look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory? - Index — by connection
Could the flower point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day? - Symbol — by convention
Does the flower mean what it means by convention — an idiom, a saying, a family phrase? Would it still mean that in another language or culture?
C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2.247–249 (icon, index, symbol)
C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), “Definitions: Symbol” — a sign stands for something known, a symbol for something not yet fully known
Ellis (1911), ch. II, on verbal links between dream images
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Recorded dreams with flower
- A white elephant with a lotus Kapilavastu (Nepal–India) · traditional (c. 6th c. BCE)
- Three branches and Pharaoh’s cup Egypt (narrative setting) · undated narrative
- An olive wreath that covered the earth Susa, Persia · 481 BCE (as told)
- Was it a dream that I saw? Forest (epic setting) · c. 4th c. BCE–4th c. CE (epic)
- The cave where Sleep lives Land of the Cimmerians (myth) · c. 8 CE (poem)
- The window with cypress and mallows Mount Tiantai, Zhejiang, China · c. 900
- Two red lotuses that would fade Tāmralipti, Bengal · c. 1070 (compiled)
- Hari on Garuda warns of a trap Pāṭaliputra (Patna) · c. 1070 (compiled)
- Waking in the Peony Pavilion Nan’an, Jiangxi (setting) · 1598 (drama)
- Easter morning, cattle on the graves Grasmere, England · c. 1819
- Wait for me a hundred years Tokyo, Japan · 1908