Dogfish in a dream: what does it mean?
A small shark sold under half a dozen other names, most of them chosen to avoid saying shark.
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 renaming. A food that sells under any name except its own is being bought by people who would refuse it accurately labelled, and he would ask what the dreamer accepted once it was called something else.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that nothing about the fish changes. The objection is entirely to the word, and the word is the only thing the trade adjusted.
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?
Familiar foods appear in dream reports, and continuity research finds them following the dreamer's actual diet and regional habit rather than carrying meaning of their own.
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?
It has been sold as rock salmon, huss, flake and rigg, and it was a staple of fish and chip shops for decades under every one of those.
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?
It has been sold under at least four names, none of them the real one, and everybody was perfectly happy with it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The same thing, acceptable once renamed.
What are the genre conventions?
A chip shop counter, and a word on a board that is not the animal.
How to subvert it
Write it labelled honestly.
Try this
Two hundred words about something people will happily accept as long as nobody says what it is.
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.
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.