Fish

In the interpretation of dreams, Fish is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the unconscious, fertility, spiritual nourishment, and insight.

Common readings

Living in the deep, the fish is read as a content of the unconscious, and, in various traditions, as fertility, nourishment or an insight rising from below.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

What changes the reading

The fish's element and fate order the readings. Fish seen alive in clear water, fish caught, fish cooked and eaten, fish dead on the shore and fish gasping out of water are treated as distinct images, the last commonly read as some living thing kept from its element. Catching a fish leans toward gain and realisation, an escaped catch toward the thing almost grasped. The water itself is read alongside the fish, clear or murky, deep or shallow, since what the fish stands for is taken to live in the condition the water shows.

In several living folk traditions a fish dream is a pregnancy omen: in Korean dream lore a carp or a fish caught and held is among the classic conception dreams, the taemong reported to expectant families, and fish carry similar news in Turkish and other folk registers. The logic is old and visible, the fish as the most fertile of creatures, spawning in uncountable numbers, living hidden in the element the traditions everywhere associate with origin. The old handbooks read fish toward gain and plenty on the same ground, a good catch being the plainest image of livelihood the ancient shorelines had.

Religious symbolism gave the fish a second career: the ichthys of the early Christians, the loaves and fishes, the apostles as fishers of men, and in South Asia the fish avatar of Vishnu who saves the first man from the flood. The fish as what is drawn up from the deep to feed became common property of the traditions.

Jung built his most sustained symbol study around exactly that: in Aion he follows the fish through Christian and alchemical history, reading the dream fish as a content of the unconscious, alive in the depths, glimpsed, caught or lost, nourishing when landed. The popular dictionaries compress this to insight and abundance. As throughout this atlas, the readings belong to their traditions; the catch is checking which tradition the dreamer's fish swam out of.