Garden

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.

The word paradise is a garden word: Greek paradeisos, borrowed from the Old Persian for a walled enclosure, the pleasure gardens of Persian kings, chosen by the Greek translators of scripture for Eden and inherited by three faiths as the name of blessedness itself. The Quran's heaven is gardens beneath which rivers flow; the cloister garth kept a square of paradise inside every monastery; the Persian carpet spreads a garden underfoot in winter. When a dreamer walks in a dream garden, the oldest furnishings of the image are these.

Eden gave the garden its plot as well as its name: innocence held, lost and longed for, the gate and the flaming sword, the garden as the state that cannot be returned to but is never forgotten. The enclosed garden of the Song of Songs added intimacy, the hortus conclusus that medieval art painted around the Virgin, the garden as the guarded inner life itself.

The interpretive traditions read the dream garden on exactly that line: the inner life as cultivated ground, its flourishing and neglect as the dreamer's own tending, the wall as privacy or enclosure, the gate as what is admitted. Voltaire's counsel to cultivate one's garden serves the modern readings as motto without their needing to know the older lineage, but the lineage is why the image carries the weight it does; no other landscape has been the actual name of happiness in so many tongues.