Plaice in a dream: what does it mean?
A flatfish that starts life upright with an eye on each side, and then has one eye travel across its skull as it lies down.
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 migration of the eye. A body that rearranges its own face in order to suit a new position is adaptation made visible, and he would ask what the dreamer had rebuilt to fit somewhere.
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 lies on one side for the rest of its life. The change is permanent and is made early, and there is no version of the adult that can go back to swimming upright.
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?
Bodily distortion and alteration are often reported in dreams, and the neurocognitive account treats changes to the dreamer's own body within a dream as accepted without question in most reports.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Both eyes end up on the upper side and the underside goes pale, so the animal is coloured for a life it had not started when it hatched.
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 eye actually crosses the skull. It is not a trick of shape, the socket moves over as the fish lies down.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Rebuilding your own face to suit where you ended up.
What are the genre conventions?
Speckled brown on top, white beneath, and both eyes looking up.
How to subvert it
Write the one whose eye does not finish crossing.
Try this
Two hundred words about a change made early that decides everything and cannot be reversed.
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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