Tree

In the interpretation of dreams, Tree is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as growth, life, rootedness, the self, and the connection of realms.

Common readings

The tree, rooted below and reaching above, is a widespread image of life and growth and, in Jungian reading, of the self that unites the depths and the heights.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

What changes the reading

The tree's condition is the reading's spine. A tree in leaf, in fruit, bare for winter, felled, uprooted or struck by lightning are distinct images, and interpreters put weight on whether the damage is seasonal or final, a bare tree implying return where an uprooted one does not. Climbing a tree, sheltering under it and planting one give the dreamer three different relations to what it stands for. Where the dream shows roots and crown together, the doubled direction of the image, downward inheritance and upward growth, is usually taken as its point.

Scripture contains a full tree dream with its interpretation attached. In the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a tree at the centre of the earth, its top reaching heaven, feeding and sheltering every creature, and then a watcher descends ordering it cut down, the stump banded in iron and bronze until seven times pass over it. Daniel reads the tree as the king himself, greatness felled for pride and preserved at the root for restoration, and the dream unfolds exactly so. The passage fixed, inside the tradition, the equivalence the dream books still use: the tree as the person, its height as their standing, its fate as theirs.

The world tree stands behind the royal one: Yggdrasil joining the nine worlds, the bodhi tree under which the Buddha woke, the trees of Eden, the axis mundi that roots in the deep and crowns in heaven. Genealogy borrowed the image the other way, the family tree making kinship a thing with roots and branches.

Jung gave the tree a late scholarly monument, an essay on the philosophical tree tracing it through alchemy as the image of the psyche's slow, rooted growth, and his tradition reads dream trees toward the self, their condition toward the dreamer's own, bare, fruiting, felled or green again. The dictionaries compress this to growth and rootedness. Daniel's watcher, notably, left the stump alive; the traditions have read hope into dream trees ever since.