Fish Dream

February 2026

Gift or Poison: On Trusting One’s Intuition

The dream at first troubled me. When I thought it through, I realized that beneath its busy, threatening surface lay a small, hard nugget of self-confidence.

In the dream I was moving house. I had packed up everything from an old place and was carrying it to a new one. Friends helped me with the boxes. There was the purposeful disorder of relocation — objects wrapped, labeled, shifted from one room to another. Among the things I transported was a large quantity of fish I had kept frozen for years. It was beautiful fish, different kinds, sashimi-grade, meant to be eaten raw. Before moving, I had had it cleaned and analyzed. The evaluation declared it sound.

I intended it as a gift for my family — a surprise. Something precious I had preserved and now wished to offer.

But the gift was discovered before I could present it. My uncle — the one who carries a dark history in my life — refused it outright. My aunt took a sample to a market for a second opinion. There, the fish was renamed. Declared a different species. Pronounced poisonous. If my family had eaten it, they were told, they would have died within an hour.

There was bustle and alarm. There was an undercurrent of accusation. The implication hovered: I had nearly harmed them. I thought: that sounds like something they would say.

Yet in the dream I did not collapse. I did not scramble to defend myself. I felt something around me — a thin, flexible membrane, permeable but protective. I interacted with everyone. I listened. I registered the second evaluation. A note of doubt flickered — as it would — but did not root.

I remembered the first evaluation. I trusted it.

The fish had been cleaned. It had been examined. It was what it was. The market’s renaming did not alter its substance.

When I woke, the imagery lingered — the frozen years, the packing and carrying, the public reclassification. But what stayed with me was not the threat. It was the steadiness. Under the dream’s agitation was a quiet fact: I trusted my own assessment.

The gift was misunderstood. Renamed. It was judged in the wrong room. But it remained: sashimi-grade.