Krill in a dream: what does it mean?
A small shrimp-like animal that exists in numbers greater than almost anything, and that the largest creatures alive eat exclusively.
How do the four traditions 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. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the inversion of scale. The biggest animal that has ever lived is sustained by one of the smallest, and he would ask what enormous thing in the dreamer's life rested on something negligible.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that no individual krill is anything. The swarm is the unit, visible from orbit, and a single one taken out of it is not a smaller version of the thing that matters.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Animals occur in dream reports in proportion to actual exposure, and continuity research finds unfamiliar species appearing rarely and generally after a recent encounter or account.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
A swarm can cover many square kilometres and colour the water red, and the whales that live on them have to eat a very great many at once for it to be worth opening their mouths.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.How can writers use this symbol?
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. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
The largest animal that has ever existed lives entirely on one of the smallest. Nothing in between is involved.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The enormous thing resting on the negligible one.
What are the genre conventions?
Red water for miles, and a mouth opening in it.
How to subvert it
Write one krill.
Try this
Two hundred words about something vast that depends completely on something too small to notice.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. 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. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.