Dreaming of garlic : what can this symbol evoke?

A protection that also keeps the living away

Wherever it is credited with warding off evil spirits, garlic works the same way : it does not fight, it repels. It is not a weapon, it is a smell — and that smell does not sort between what it drives away.

The symbol is therefore harsher than it looks, and that is what makes it useful. Certain protections work exactly so : a brusqueness that discourages nuisances and everyone else, a reputation for difficulty that shields from harassment and from friendship, a reserve that keeps one safe and alone.

Garlic in dreams often designates that kind of defence. The question it poses is not "what are you protecting yourself from?" but : who else are you keeping away without having meant to?

What grows underground and divides

Garlic is a bulb : it forms in the dark, and the head one pulls up comes apart into identical cloves, each able to give a whole plant again. Nothing shows of the work that produced it.

This structure evokes what is prepared out of sight and reveals itself by dividing : a strength acquired in a dark period, a family each of whose members carries the same imprint, a decision long ripened in silence and then unfolding into several consequences.

What to remember is what you do with the head of garlic. Keeping it whole, separating it, planting a clove or crushing it do not say the same thing about your relation to what ripened without a witness.

What you do with it changes the reading

• Carrying some for protection — a defence knowingly adopted, with the isolation it brings.
• Smelling it on someone else — a distance the other imposes, which you perceive without it being said.
• Peeling a clove — the patient gesture of removing what covers, down to the usable part.
• Crushing the garlic — releasing at once what was not showing : it is the crushing that brings out the smell.
• An intact, unopened head — what has ripened in you without anyone, yourself included, yet knowing its strength.
• Planting a clove — accepting that what grew in the shade should reproduce in daylight.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology takes an interest in protections that cost : those that keep danger away and, with it, part of life. It recalls that a long-installed defence ceases to be chosen and becomes a character trait. Other readings retain above all the bulb's structure, seeing a figure of what is constituted in darkness before appearing.