Dreaming About Fruit

Fruit is a dream image about timing. Ripe, unripe, overripe and rotten count as four separate pictures, and interpreters ask which one you were holding before they ask anything else. The general association is with results, the point at which effort turns into something you can pick. It seldom appears on its own: a bowl, a market stall, a branch still holding it, and the setting is part of what gets read.

• Ripe. Traditionally read as something ready, and occasionally as a nudge that waiting any longer serves no purpose.
• Unripe. Read as earliness rather than failure, which makes it one of the gentler readings in the whole dictionary.
• Overripe or bruised. Associated with a moment left slightly too long.
• Rotten. Usually taken as disappointment already known about rather than as anything still ahead.

Picking, buying, sharing

What you did with it shapes the reading further. Picking is connected to earning something directly, buying to obtaining it by other means, and being handed fruit to receiving something from another person. Sharing it out appears in a good many traditions as generosity that comes back round, though that is offered as an old moral reading and not as a promise of anything. Fruit also arrives in dreams for the flattest reason available, which is that you ate some, or wanted to.

Particular fruits, particular places

Individual fruits carry strongly local meanings. Pomegranates, figs, dates, oranges and apples each sit inside stories that shift from one region to the next, and a reading built around one of them will not transfer intact. Where a fruit belongs to your own household calendar, a tree in a grandparent's garden, something you associate with a particular season or festival, that association is the one to work from.