Dreaming of a thistle : what can this symbol evoke?

A defence that precedes attack

A thistle's spines are permanently there : they do not deploy at the approach of danger, they are part of the plant. It is a constant protection, independent of any real threat.

Dreams often use this figure for a defence become character. Someone prickly, difficult at first, whose reaction always precedes the situation — and who rarely chose to be so. The protection ceased being a response and became a way of being.

The question it poses is useful, and holds for you as for a relative : what was that defence built against, and does that thing still exist?

The flower one does not pick

The forgotten detail is that the thistle flowers : a dense purple flower bees prefer to many others. It is real and almost nobody looks at it, because one cannot approach.

That is the symbol's second side, and the truer one. What defends itself too well is not empty : it is simply unreachable, and ends by being held hostile. Many dreamers discover in this dream that they classified someone — or themselves — on the strength of the spines alone.

What to remember is what you saw first. The spines, or the flower : the order of perception often says what you grant to what resists.

What the plant shows changes the reading

• Being pricked while approaching — a defence acting before any hostile intent on your part.
• Seeing the purple flower — recognising what a forbidding appearance protects.
• A field of thistles — a whole milieu where nothing lets itself be approached.
• Pulling up a thistle — removing a defence without knowing what it held up.
• A thistle on ground where nothing else grows — what holds where conditions are bad.
• Seeds carried off by the wind — what disseminates unplanted, and will return.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology distinguishes defences responding to a situation from those become traits : the latter are no longer discussed and end by producing the isolation they meant to avoid. It notes that such figures often appear in dreams when someone begins to sense this mechanism in themselves. Other readings retain the thistle's flower, recalling that what protects itself best generally has something to protect.