Skate in a dream: what does it mean?
A flat cartilaginous fish whose egg case washes up as a black leathery purse, and whose body was cut and dried into fake monsters.
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 manufacture. A creature carved into the shape of a demon and sold as one is a fraud that needed a real animal underneath, and he would ask what the dreamer had dressed up.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the underside of a skate already looks like a face. Nobody had to invent much, and the fakes largely emphasised what people were already seeing.
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?
Dreams containing figures that are almost but not quite human are often reported across collections, and content analysis records ambiguous or altered faces among the more emotionally charged elements.
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?
Dried and carved skates were sold across Europe as basilisks, devils and mermaids under the name Jenny Haniver, and the egg cases are still called mermaid's purses on every coast.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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?
Sailors carved dried skates into devils and sold them as specimens. The trade had a name and lasted centuries.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The monster made out of something real.
What are the genre conventions?
A black purse in the tideline, and a face on the underside of a fish.
How to subvert it
Write the buyer who knows and buys it anyway.
Try this
Two hundred words about a fake that worked because the real thing already looked wrong.
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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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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