Dreaming about
plants

Anyone who has kept a houseplant alive knows plants are slow, patient and very honest. Give them light and water and they grow, forget them for a couple of weeks and they show it. Dreaming about plants usually points to growth and care, something in your life you're tending or that needs tending, whether that's a relationship, a project, a child or your own health.

The state of the plants is what decides the reading. Thriving ones, dying ones and ones that have taken over the room are three different dreams. So is the question of who was looking after them, you or someone else, and whether you felt proud of them or guilty about them.

What dreaming about plants means

Plants grow slowly, toward the light, from roots you can't see. Each of those facts has its own reading, and dreams usually lean on one of them.

Growth that takes time

People say an idea has to take root, that someone is a late bloomer, that a new place grows on you. Plants in a dream are often about growth of that slow kind, a skill you're learning, a friendship deepening, healing after something hard. If you watched a plant grow in the dream, ask what in your life has been quietly growing too.

What you care for

Looking after plants is close to looking after people. A dream of tending them can be about a child, a partner, aging parents or a team at work, and their health in the dream often mirrors how you think that care is going. A garden full of plants can carry that sense of nurturing, being cared for or doing the caring.

Turning toward the light

Plants lean toward light, and a plant straining toward a window can be about you reaching for something you need, attention, warmth, a bit more room to grow. A plant left in the dark is the opposite, something kept from what it needs.

Dreaming about watering plants

Watering is the most common plant dream, and it's about effort and care. If the plants perked up, you're probably seeing results from something you've been patient with. If the water ran straight through or the soil stayed dry, the dream may be about care that isn't getting through, a relationship where you give a lot and it doesn't seem to help. Overwatering until the pot floods is often about trying too hard, smothering something with attention.

Dreaming about dead plants

A row of brown, dried-up plants is usually about neglect, and very often your own. It tends to come when you've been too busy to look after your sleep, your friendships or a hobby that used to keep you well. Guilt is common in this dream, especially if the plants were a gift or belonged to someone else. If you managed to save one, the dream may be showing that something you thought was lost can still come back.

Dreaming about plants growing out of control

Plants that have taken over your house, climbing walls and blocking doors, are growth that's gone too far. It might be a project that has eaten your evenings, a family situation that keeps expanding, or a feeling (resentment, a crush) that you let grow without noticing. A house turned into a jungle is the same dream at full strength. If the overgrowth felt beautiful, it can also be about abundance and more life than you know what to do with.

Dreaming about planting something

Putting a seed or a seedling in the ground is a dream about starting something whose results you won't see for a while. It often comes when you're beginning a long project, saving for something, trying for a baby or putting down roots in a new place. The dream is usually about patience and trust, and noting the dream in a journal is a good way to see later what grew. There's more on using a dream journal for your goals.

Dreaming about plants according to Jung and Freud

A plant is one of the quietest symbols in the dictionary, and each man has something to say to it.

Jung: the garden and the plowed field

Among the images Jung grouped under the mother, the nearest to this page are the garden, the plowed field and the tree, all places where something is fed until it grows.^[1] A dream full of plants can share that mother-feeling, of being tended or doing the tending. That's our reading, since he never named a houseplant, but it hands you a question: were you the gardener or the plant, and was the dream about the care you give or the care you want?

Freud: whose plant was it?

Freud left no reading of plants, only a way of working, in which a dream borrows from recent days and from what the dreamer says about each image. For a dead plant, that makes the useful question whose it was.^[2] If it was a gift, the guilt may belong to the giver more than to the plant. A plant you manage to revive is his idea of the wish at its plainest, the dream granting a chance to make things right.

The spiritual meaning of plants in dreams

Grass from the navel in Buddhist and Hindu texts

The Anguttara Nikaya, an early Buddhist discourse, tells of the five great dreams the Buddha had on the night of his awakening. In the second, grass grew from his navel up to the sky, which the text says came true when the eightfold path was taught to gods and humans.^[3] The Agni Purana, a Sanskrit text that gives a chapter to omens in dreams, lists grass or a tree growing from the navel among the good ones, and grass growing all over the body except the navel among the bad.^[4] It's a stranger picture than a houseplant, but in both texts a plant growing from the body is a sign of something good taking hold.

Questions to ask about your plant dream

Plants are about care, so most of the questions are about who was caring for whom.

• Were the plants healthy, dying, overgrown or just planted?
• Were you looking after them, or was someone else?
• Where were they, at home, at work or somewhere you used to live?
• What in your life needs more attention right now, or less?

Oniri asks you a few questions like these before it reads your dream, and most of what it tells you is built on your answers.