Hake in a dream: what does it mean?
A deep-water fish barely eaten in the country that catches it and prized in the countries that buy 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 export. A thing produced in one place and valued in another means the people nearest it never learned to want it, and he would ask what the dreamer had beside them and did not use.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that taste is local and not natural. Nothing about the fish decides who wants it, and the whole difference is a habit that formed in one place and not another.
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?
Food appears in dream reports and continuity research finds it tracking the dreamer's real diet and regional habits rather than functioning symbolically.
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?
British and Irish boats have landed it for export to Spain and Portugal for a very long time while home markets ignored it, and it is among the most prized fish in one and among the least in the other.
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 same boat lands a fish that is a delicacy at one end of Europe and unsellable at the other.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Valued everywhere except where it is caught.
What are the genre conventions?
A quayside, a lorry going south, and nothing kept back.
How to subvert it
Write it eaten at home.
Try this
Two hundred words about something abundant and locally ignored that somebody far away treasures.
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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