Dreaming of an ash tree : what can this symbol evoke?

A tree that holds the worlds together

Yggdrasil is not scenery : it is the very structure of the Norse universe. The roots descend to the underworlds, the trunk crosses the world of men, the branches carry the vault of sky. Remove the tree and nothing holds together.

Dreams often use this figure for what, in you, links levels nothing else links. A practice holding together your material life and what you believe, a person bridging two worlds of your existence, a family memory tying the present to what preceded it.

The question it poses is precise : what in your life holds the storeys together? Those who dream of great trees often live through moments when those storeys have come apart.

A knowledge paid for from below

The best-known episode of this myth is also the most instructive : Odin does not climb the tree to obtain the runes, he hangs from it. Nine days and nine nights, wounded, suspended, without food — and knowledge comes to him from below, from beneath the roots.

That structure contradicts the common reading of spiritual ascent, and that is what makes it valuable. Knowledge is not obtained by rising but by accepting a suspension : a state in which one holds to nothing and can do nothing.

What to remember is your position in relation to the tree. Looking at it, climbing it, or hanging from it tell three very different relations — and the third, rare, generally accompanies periods of ordeal whose outcome dreamers cannot yet see.

What the tree does changes the reading

• An immense tree crossing several levels — what holds together separated storeys of your life.
• Roots descending very deep — what ties you to something older than yourself.
• Hanging from its branches — a motionless ordeal from which knowledge may come, but not yet.
• An ash shedding its leaves and starting again — the cycle ancient Scandinavians observed in it each year.
• A beast gnawing the roots — the discreet wearing of what supports you, invisible from above.
• A tree surviving destruction — Yggdrasil outlasts the end of the world : what begins again is already there.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Analytical psychology places the world tree among figures of the axis, like the column and the mountain : it gives a centre from which levels are ordered. It takes particular interest in Odin's sacrifice, where knowledge comes from below rather than above, which meets its description of descent as the condition of transformation. Other readings retain the variety of world trees across cultures — oak among the Celts and at Dodona, ash among the Germanic peoples.