The Dream Book of Self-Knowledge
- individual: symbolizes the phallus.
- many prickles, thorns: symbolizes sexuality.
- injuring: sexuality hurts feelings.
- thorny bushes: reveals the sexual nature of the refuge of instinctual personifications.
- thrusting a thorn into a body: in the dreams of women this indicates the subconscious desire for sex and in the dreams of men it means the subconscious desire to experience a homosexual connection.
- working one's way through a thorny path: in men's dreams it is an attempt to uproot from one's experience one's instinctual and sexual essence (the thorns) and emotional outbursts (flowers among the thorns) so that, in freeing oneself from instincts and emotions, spiritual anima can be discovered (the similarity with Sleeping Beauty is no coincidence).
- a crown of thorns: only belongs to a person that consciously abandons the material world, meaning everything earthly, including power, which he considers to be suffering, which is why the conventional crown turns into a crown of thorns in his consciousness.
