Dreaming about
mermaids

Long before cartoons gave them red hair and best friends who were fish, mermaids were dangerous. Sailors told of women in the waves whose singing drew ships onto the rocks, and the stories warned you to look but not to listen. Dreaming about mermaids usually keeps some of that old edge. It tends to point to something beautiful you don't quite trust, like a person, an offer or a desire that might pull you under, or to the feeling of being caught between two worlds and fully at home in neither.

So look at what kind of mermaid it was, and where you were when you met her. Watching one from the shore, swimming beside one and finding your own legs turned into a tail are very different dreams. How you felt also counts for a lot. Enchanted, uneasy, envious? Each of those changes the reading.

What dreaming about mermaids means

A mermaid is half human and half fish, at home in the sea but always looking up at the land. Most of her meanings come from that split, and from the stories told about her.

Something beautiful you don't trust

In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus has his crew plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast so he can hear the Sirens sing without steering onto their rocks. Later art turned the Sirens into mermaids, and the idea stuck. A singing mermaid in your dream is often something that pulls you in and puts you on guard in the same moment, like a new relationship that seems too good, a job offer with strings, a habit that feels lovely and costs more than it should. And did you want to swim toward her, or tie yourself to the mast?

Between two worlds

In Hans Christian Andersen's story, the little mermaid gives up her voice for a pair of legs, and every step on land feels like walking on knives. A mermaid dream often comes when you're living between two places, two cultures or two identities, like a new country and the one you grew up in, two families after a divorce, or a self at work and a self at home. The dream asks what you're giving up to belong, and whether it's your voice.

Desire under the surface

Mermaids are sensual figures, half-naked and half-hidden, and a mermaid dream can simply be about desire, especially a desire you're not acting on. If you felt pulled toward the mermaid, ask who or what you're drawn to right now and what keeps you on the shore.

Not what it seems

When Columbus sailed near Hispaniola in 1493, he wrote that he'd seen three mermaids rise from the sea and that they were not as beautiful as they were painted. They were almost certainly manatees, the slow, whiskered sea cows we still find on those coasts. A mermaid who turned out to be something else in your dream, uglier, older or not human at all, can be about seeing a person or a dream of yours clearly for the first time.

Dreaming about turning into a mermaid

Growing a tail in a dream is a change in who you are, often welcome, sometimes frightening. It tends to come when you're stepping into a new role (becoming a parent, coming out, leaving a career) and finding that you belong somewhere different from where you started. If the tail felt freeing, you're at home in the change. But if you were stranded on land with it, you may feel your new self doesn't fit your old life.

Dreaming about a mermaid singing to you

A song you can't resist is temptation in its purest form. It might be a person you know you shouldn't get involved with, or a plan that sounds wonderful and keeps your eyes off the rocks. What did the song sound like, and did you swim toward it? If you managed to stay put, you may be stronger against that pull than you think.

Dreaming about swimming with a mermaid

Swimming alongside a mermaid is usually a joyful dream, about ease with your feelings and with your own body. It's the friendly side of the sea, close to dreams of swimming with dolphins. If the mermaid led you somewhere, a cave, a sunken ship, a city under the sea, look at where you're being drawn in your waking life, especially toward something new.

Dreaming about a mermaid pulling you underwater

A mermaid dragging you down is the darker side of the myth. It's often an attraction, a relationship or a feeling that you fear could swallow you, like the dread of drowning in someone else's needs. Whose hand was it? If you broke free, you're keeping your head above water. And if you went under and could still breathe, the thing you fear may be less dangerous than it looks.

Dreaming about a mermaid on land

A mermaid out of the water, flopping on a beach or trying to walk, is someone out of her element. It may be you, in a job or a place that doesn't suit you, or someone close who's struggling to fit in. If you carried her back to the sea, you're helping a part of yourself, or someone you love, get back to where they belong. Scottish and Irish folk tales have the same figure in the selkie, a seal that sheds its skin to become a woman. A man who steals the skin can keep her until she finds it again and goes straight back to the sea, and a dream that feels like that is about a part of you that was hidden away and wants to go home.

Dreaming about a merman

Mermen are rarer in stories, but they turn up in dreams more often than you'd guess. A merman is often about attraction to a man who belongs to another world, someone unavailable, from a different background, or never quite present. For a man, a merman can be a picture of himself caught between a strong, physical side and a feeling side he doesn't show.

Dreaming about mermaids according to Jung and Freud

Half woman and half fish, a mermaid sits on the border of both men's symbol lists.

Jung: the mermaid as anima

Jung saw water as the commonest dream picture of the unconscious,^[1] and he described the anima as a female figure who stands for the feeling, intuitive side of a man's psyche.^[2] The mermaid isn't one of the images his lists single out, but she joins the two: a woman who lives in the depths and calls you down into them. For a man, a mermaid dream can be about getting to know that side of himself, with the risk of losing himself in it. A woman, who in Jung's scheme meets an animus instead, may find the sea itself doing the calling, since the sea is on his list of mother symbols, with still waters beside it.^[1]

Freud: the song as a wish

Freud's symbol list puts fish among the genital symbols and shows birth through water,^[3] so said plainly, his list would hear the tail as sexual and the sea as where we come from. That is a fallback, though, and the wish idea fits better. A song you can't resist and a hand that pulls you under are a pleasure that gets past the dreamer by arriving with a warning attached, which is how he thought a wish gets in when waking life wouldn't welcome it. Whose voice it was, and what you'd been trying not to want that week, is where he'd begin.

Questions to ask about your mermaid dream

The mermaid's song is always about something specific in your own life, so try these questions.

• Were you watching the mermaid, swimming with her, or turning into one?
• Did she feel kind, dangerous, or both?
• What were you drawn toward, and what held you back?
• Where in your life do you feel caught between two worlds?
• Is there something beautiful that you don't fully trust right now?

Oniri reads a mermaid dream with your answers in mind, so a tail you were proud of and a hand that pulled you under each get their own reading.