Dreaming About a Tree

No other dream image is divided up quite like this. A tree is read from the bottom towards the top, and every tradition that uses it assigns distinct meanings to the roots, the trunk and the branches. Taken whole, it represents a life with a history and a direction, growth that cannot be rushed, which is why it tends to appear during long slow stretches rather than sudden ones.

Reading it in layers

• Roots. Family, origin and whatever holds you in place. Roots exposed above the soil are taken as a sense of that footing being disturbed.
• Trunk. The present state of things and how much weight it can bear. A hollow or split trunk is the detail dreamers remember longest.
• Branches and leaves. Outward life, work and relationships. Bare in winter counts as a pause rather than a loss, a distinction the older sources make deliberately.
• Fruit. Results, and traditionally the most favourable form the image takes anywhere it appears.

The felled tree

Cutting one down, or coming upon one already down, is the version that unsettles people most. Readings differ according to who held the axe. A tree the dreamer fells is generally understood as ending something deliberately, occasionally with regret attached to the decision. One brought down by wind or by strangers points to change arriving from outside. Neither has anything to say about anybody's health or lifespan, and the folk versions claiming otherwise are folklore rather than interpretation.

Which tree was it

Ask that before anything else. An olive, a birch, a baobab and a plane tree carry very different weight in the places they grow, and a great deal of tree symbolism is regional instead of universal. More to the point, a tree from a garden you knew as a child arrives loaded with everything that garden held, and no general meaning can compete with it. Dreamers able to name the species almost always find their answer sitting inside the name.