Anchovy in a dream: what does it mean?
A small oily fish salted and fermented into a sauce that flavoured an entire empire's cooking and then vanished from it.
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 disappearance. A taste that everybody used and nobody now recognises went out of memory rather than out of existence, and he would ask what the dreamer had entirely forgotten liking.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the fish is used as a background. Anchovy dissolves into a dish and is not detected, so it does its work by being unidentifiable.
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?
Taste is among the least frequently reported senses in dream accounts, and content analysis finds it noted rarely and usually only when strong or unexpected.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Roman garum was made from fermented fish and was in nearly everything, produced in vats at industrial scale, and the surviving descendants of it are the fish sauces of southeast Asia.
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 Romans put fermented fish sauce in almost every dish, and the nearest thing to it now is made on the other side of the world.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The ingredient that works by not being identifiable.
What are the genre conventions?
A dark fillet dissolving in a warm pan, and nobody able to name it.
How to subvert it
Write somebody tasting garum for the first time.
Try this
Two hundred words about a flavour that was everywhere and is now unrecognisable.
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.
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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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