What does it mean to dream about fish?
A fish often pictures something below the surface of awareness that you are starting to catch hold of.
Four ways to read it
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream.
Freud
A Freudian reading can take the fish, gliding in deep water, as an image with sexual and generative associations, and as something arising from the depths of the body and mind. Catching one pictures bringing a hidden content to the surface.
Freudian reading (our summary).Jung
For Jung the fish is a content of the unconscious brought up into the light, an image of insight or a developing self surfacing from the deep. It carries old associations with renewal and with the emergent spirit.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Cognitively a fish often pictures something below the surface of awareness, an idea, feeling, or insight the dreamer is starting to catch hold of. Clear water and a caught fish track insight gained; murky water tracks something still out of reach.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
The fish is a symbol of abundance, the deep, and the sacred across cultures: emblem of early Christianity, the great fish of scripture and myth, fish of wisdom and plenty in Celtic and other traditions, like the Salmon of Knowledge. It rises from the unknown bearing meaning.
Bulfinch; Miller (1901).For writers
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out.
In literature
The fish is the oldest image of the thing pursued and barely understood, and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is the argument's fullest form: the marlin is an adversary, a prize, and finally a wreck lashed to the side of the boat. Older layers run underneath, from the fish as a Christian sign to the folk-tale fish that grants a wish and takes it back.
The folk-tale wish-granting fish tradition, the Grimms (1812), public domain; Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), referenced only.What it does in a story
A fish belongs to a world the character cannot enter, so catching one is always a small act of theft from somewhere else. That is why the catch so often turns out to cost more than it is worth.
Genre conventions
Literary fiction uses fishing for patience, fathers, and silence between men. Folk tale uses the fish as a bargain. Crime fiction uses water for disposal, and a fish is what finds what was disposed of.
How to subvert it
Write the catch released, and let the character regret releasing it for the rest of the story. Fiction usually treats letting go as the mature choice; treating it as a loss the character never resolves is more honest and much less written.
Try this
Write two people fishing and not talking for two pages. Convey a twenty-year disagreement without either mentioning it.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted
The 1901 dictionary our folk and symbolic readings adapt from. Public domain and free to read online.
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