In the interpretation of dreams, Garden is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the inner life cultivated, its growth, peace, or neglect.
Common readings
The garden is read as the state of the inner life: flourishing or overgrown, tended or neglected, a cultivated and often peaceful image of the self.
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 garden's state is read as a report: flourishing, overgrown, withered, walled or trespassed upon. Interpreters ask whether the dreamer is gardener or visitor, since tending the beds and merely walking them describe different relations to the inner life the image is taken to show. Weeds, drought and neglect are read without alarm as ordinary seasons of attention, while a locked or secret garden shifts the emphasis to what is being kept enclosed, and by whom. What is growing there, when the dream names it, is usually the detail that settles the reading.