Grayling in a dream: what does it mean?
A river fish with an enormous sail of a dorsal fin, said to smell faintly of thyme, which is where its Latin name comes from.
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 naming by smell. A creature classified by an odour rather than by any visible feature was placed by the least reliable sense, and he would ask what the dreamer identified without looking.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the fin is only raised sometimes. The most striking thing about the fish is folded away most of the time and shows when it is holding position in a current.
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?
Smell is the least reported sense in dream accounts, and content analysis finds it noted only rarely and generally when very strong.
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?
The scientific name means thyme-smelling, and anglers have argued about whether it is really there for as long as there have been anglers writing things down.
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?
Its scientific name means it smells of thyme. People have been arguing about whether that is true for four hundred years.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Identified by the least reliable sense there is.
What are the genre conventions?
A grey fish in fast water, and a great fin going up.
How to subvert it
Write somebody who cannot smell it and says so.
Try this
Two hundred words about a claim everybody repeats and nobody can settle.
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.