Herring in a dream: what does it mean?
A small oily fish that moved in shoals large enough to build towns on, and that gave English a phrase for a deliberate distraction.
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 drawing away. A strong smell dragged across a trail to send a follower somewhere else is misdirection by excess rather than by concealment, and he would ask what the dreamer had over-supplied.
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's importance was collective. No individual herring matters at all, and entire economies rested on where the shoal happened to go that year.
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 and work appear in dream reports according to waking exposure, and continuity research finds occupational content among the strongest predictors of what a person dreams about.
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?
Smoked herring turns red and reeks, and a red herring drawn across a trail was said to throw dogs off. Whole ports rose and emptied as the shoals shifted along the coast.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
Towns were built where the shoal came and abandoned when it went somewhere else. The fish decided the map.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Misdirection by giving far too much of something.
What are the genre conventions?
A silver mass under a boat, and a harbour full for one season.
How to subvert it
Write the year the shoal does not come.
Try this
Two hundred words about a place whose entire existence depended on where something went that year.
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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