Dreaming about
fish

Fish live where you can't follow them, under a surface you can only see a little way into, and that's most of why they turn up in dreams. Dreaming about fish usually has to do with something moving below your own surface, a feeling or an idea or a hope you haven't fully looked at yet. In many families the dream has a second and much older reading too, and plenty of people who search for it are really asking whether it means someone is pregnant.

What the fish was doing decides which reading fits. A fish you pull out of a river is a different dream from one floating belly-up in a tank, and a fish on your plate is different again. How you felt matters as much as the scene, and so does whatever was going on in your life that week, so the same fish can mean opposite things for two people.

What dreaming about fish means

Most of what people read into fish comes from a few plain facts about them. They live in water, they're quick and slippery and hard to hold, and catching one has always been half patience and half luck. Each of those gives you a reading.

Something rising from below

A fish that breaks the surface is the classic picture of something coming into awareness. It might be an idea for a project, a memory you hadn't thought about in years, or a feeling about someone that you've kept under for a while. If you were watching the fish with interest rather than fear, the dream is usually a good one, because it shows you noticing what was already there.

Plenty, luck and a good catch

Fish lay eggs by the thousand (a single cod can lay millions in a season), so for most of history they've stood for plenty and fertility. English still says there are plenty more fish in the sea after a breakup. A dream full of fish, or one where they kept biting, often turns up when something in your life is opening up (money, love, work). And it can mean you're finally letting yourself want more of it.

Something slippery

When a deal or a person doesn't add up, people say it's fishy. A fish that slipped out of your hands tends to be about something you can't get a firm hold on, like a chance that keeps getting away or someone whose story keeps changing. Who has felt hard to pin down lately? And is it a person, or a plan of your own?

What you've been doing lately

Some fish dreams are simpler than any of this, because dreams follow what you spend your days on, and people who fish, keep an aquarium or work with food dream about those things more than others do.^[1] So if you went fishing last weekend or had sushi the night before, the dream may just be replaying the day. The meaning is then in how the fish made you feel.

Dreaming about dead fish

Dead fish and fish dying are the darkest of the common fish dreams, and people search for them as often as each other. Usually the dream is about something you were supposed to keep alive and haven't, like a hope you stopped tending, a project left in a drawer or a friendship that went quiet. A fish dying in a tank you own points straight at your own neglect, and you'll usually know what it means the moment you wake. A dead fish in the sea or washed up on a beach is less personal, closer to a disappointment that happened to you than one you caused.

English has "a cold fish" for someone with no warmth, so the dead fish may really be about a person (or a feeling in you that's gone flat). If you were sad in the dream, take that sadness seriously, because it's often the first sign of a loss you haven't admitted yet.

Dreaming about catching fish

Catching a fish is about getting hold of something you want. It can be an idea, a job, a person's attention or a feeling you finally understand. How you caught it adds detail. A rod and line is patience, a net is a big effort that brings in a lot at once, and grabbing a fish with your bare hands is luck or nerve.

A big catch is mostly a good dream, about a win you're hoping for or have just had. But if the big fish got away at the last moment, think about the one that got away in your waking life, because that phrase exists for a reason. Struggling to land a huge fish that pulls you toward the water can mean the thing you're chasing is starting to control you.

Dreaming about fish and pregnancy

The belief that a fish dream means someone is pregnant is old and widespread, and it's still repeated in many families, especially African American ones. It makes sense as folklore, because fish lay huge numbers of eggs, and water and birth have been linked in dreams for as long as people have written about them. Freud read falling into water or climbing out of it as a picture of birth, which comes up again below.

A dream can't tell you whether you or anyone else is pregnant, and only a test can. What a fish dream can show is how much a pregnancy is on your mind, whether you're hoping for one, worried about one or already expecting. If you're curious whether any dream can see ahead, the post on whether dreams can predict the future goes through the evidence, and there's a separate page on dreaming about being pregnant.

Dreaming about a fish tank

A fish tank is a small, controlled world behind glass, and dreams about one tend to be about watching your feelings from the outside. You can see everything moving, but you're not in the water with it. If you were calmly watching the fish, the dream can be about a healthy distance from something that used to overwhelm you. If you felt like one of the fish yourself, it's more likely about feeling boxed in or on display, at work or in a family where everyone can see what you do.

The state of the tank matters too. Cloudy, dirty water suggests something you've been meaning to clean up and haven't. And a cracked tank spilling water across the floor is feelings you've held in for a long time starting to come out.

Dreaming about eating fish

Eating something in a dream is about taking it in, so eating fish can mean you're absorbing an idea, a lesson or someone's influence. Fried or cooked fish is something that has been prepared and is ready to use, which fits a plan you've finally worked out or a situation you've already digested. Cooking it yourself is the work of getting there. Raw fish can mean you've accepted something before it was ready. And a bone stuck in your throat is a classic picture of something you can't swallow, words included.

Dreaming about a fish out of water

This one is the idiom, almost word for word. A fish gasping on a dock is how a dream shows you feeling out of place, in a new job, a new city or a group where you don't speak the language. Did you put it back in the water? Then the dream may be about getting back to something familiar, or finding the people you feel at home with. But if you just watched it struggle, ask where you've stopped trying to fit in.

Dreaming about koi fish

Koi carry their own folklore. In a Chinese legend, big fish that fight their way up the rapids at the Dragon Gate turn into dragons (later tellings make them carp), so the fish stands for persistence and for success earned against the current. In Japan, carp-shaped streamers are flown for children on Children's Day for the same reason. Koi can also live for decades, so a koi dream is often about patience, about something slow that's still growing, or about a goal you've been swimming toward for a long time.

Dreaming about fish in clear or muddy water

The water around the fish is half the dream. Fish moving in clear water usually means you can see what you feel and why, which is one of the calmer readings on this page. Muddy water with fish you can only glimpse is confusion, a feeling or a decision you haven't sorted out yet. If the water got clearer as the dream went on, that's often a sign you're closer to an answer than you think.

Dreaming about fish according to Jung and Freud

Jung's water gives a fish somewhere to live, and Freud put fish on his list of symbols outright.

Jung: what lives in the water

Water, Jung said, is the symbol of the unconscious you meet most often.^[2] A fish is what lives in it, so, taking his idea one step further than he did (he didn't write about fish), a fish is something from beneath your waking mind that has come near enough to see: a feeling, a hunch, a memory. That's the "something rising from below" reading above, and the water matters in his terms too, since how clear it is shows how much of what's down there you can make out.

Freud: fish on the symbol list

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud put fish on his list of animals that dreams use as genital symbols, alongside snails, cats and mice, with the snake as the most important.^[3] He also saw birth in water dreams, in falling into water or climbing out of it. So for Freud a fish dream could easily be about sex or about birth, dressed up just enough to let you sleep through it. But he also wanted the dreamer's own associations first, ahead of any symbol, so a fish that reminds you of your father's fishing trips is about your father first.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of fish in dreams

A great fish, a fisherman's call and a Chinese poem about plentiful years give fish three old stories to stand on.

Fish in the Bible

The best-known fish in the Bible is the great fish that swallows Jonah, who spends three days and three nights inside it.^[4] Jesus calls two fishermen to follow him and promises to make them "fishers of men",^[5] and feeds a crowd with five loaves and two fish.^[6] Early Christians even used a simple fish as a secret sign. If your fish dream felt spiritual, those stories are where that feeling comes from, though the text describes them and doesn't tell you what your dream means.

Fish in the Classic of Poetry

China's Classic of Poetry (Shijing), the oldest collection of Chinese poems, has herdsmen dream of crowds turning into fish, and the court diviner reads it as a sign of plentiful years.^[7] That's the same old link between fish and plenty that the folklore above runs on.

Questions to ask about your fish dream

None of the readings above beats what you already know about your own life. A few questions narrow it down quickly.

• Were the fish alive and moving, or dead, gasping or cooked?
• Was the water clear, muddy, or missing altogether?
• Did you catch the fish, eat it, watch it, or lose it?
• Does fishing, an aquarium or a particular meal mean something to you?
• What have you been hoping for, or keeping below the surface, in the past few weeks?

Before Oniri reads a dream, it asks about your life and the part of the dream you want to focus on. Your answers above are what it works with.