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Fish in dreams: what it can mean

  • Animals
  • Nature
  • New beginnings

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The short answer

Fish are a very common dream image in several cultures, where tradition often ties them to pregnancy or abundance. Psychologically, catching or losing a fish often follows how you feel about an opportunity.

Your dream is not everyone's

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Three ways to read it

Psychology and research

Research

Fish live in water, so they share its emotional colour: clear or murky, calm or rough. A continuity reading might connect catching a fish with getting hold of an opportunity, and a fish slipping away with something you could not keep. In some families and cultures, dreaming of fish is widely believed to announce a pregnancy, and hearing that belief can itself shape what people dream and remember.

Folk tradition

Tradition, not science

Tradition: American popular dream books, around 1900

Dream books around 1900 read fish in clear water as favour from powerful people and dead fish as loss. In Russian and several other folk traditions, fish dreams are also widely linked with pregnancy. These are beliefs, not predictions.

Questions to ask yourself

  1. Did you catch the fish, watch it or lose it?
  2. What opportunity or new beginning is on your mind?
  3. What did the water around the fish look like?

Related symbols

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. G. William Domhoff (2001). A New Neurocognitive Theory of Dreams. Dreaming 11(1): 13-33.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: pp. 13-33 (dreams as simulations of personal concerns) (reference not yet checked)

    Dreams as embodied simulations of personal concerns (the continuity view). The backbone of our psychology lens.

  2. Antonio Zadra, Robert Stickgold (2021). When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep. New York: W. W. Norton.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: the NEXTUP model (reference not yet checked)

    NEXTUP model: dreaming explores weak, unexpected associations between memories.

  3. Gustavus Hindman Miller (1901). What's in a Dream (later reissued as Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted).

    public domain

    • Cited at: entry: Fish (reference not yet checked)

    An American popular dream dictionary. Its entries are written as omens ("foretells"); we only report how people once read a symbol, never as a forecast.