Modern Mythology

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When we moved to our current house in the summer of 2001, we inherited a nice little fish pond that was populated by thirteen large goldfish. The pond was pretty close to being deep enough to keep the fish outside all winter, but we decided against it and bought a 55 gallon aquarium so they could spend the cold months in the basement.

Looking after this many fish is not a trivial task! Maintaining an aquarium is practically a science in itself, and goldfish are very messy. It was a constant battle to keep the water clean and algea-free. That aside, however, it was nice having the fish. It was very peaceful to sit and watch them float around.

The years passed, and, much to my surprise, not a single fish died. They grew and grew; the larger ones were roughly a foot long. Each spring I’d take them all out to the pond, and each fall I’d bring them back into the house. The only close call we’d ever had was when one of them somehow managed to wedge itself into a small hole in the bottom of a plastic decoration in the aquarium.

Last summer, it became Drew’s job to feed the fish each day. After school one day, he came back from feeding them and said that he couldn’t see any of them in the pond. Janette took a look and confirmed that they were all missing.

What a surprise! Five years had passed without incident, and then all thirteen disappeared in a single night!

We’re still not sure what happened to them. No fish parts have been discovered. Our first thought was that a family of stray cats from our neighbourhood were probably responsible. We’d seen one of them running out of our back yard a couple of days earlier carrying something (I’ll write more about these cats some other time). However, the kittens in this family are still quite small. It seems like they’d have a hard time catching such big fish. Raccoons are a definite possibility, but we haven’t had any problem with them in the past. Perhaps there was something different – the water level was higher than usual, so perhaps this allowed the raccoons to get a better grab on the fish.

Drew got upset when we turned off the filter in the pond, because he was worried that they were still there, hiding in a shady spot. I guess, for the kids, it’s a somewhat gentle introduction to death and the ways in which nature can seem cruel at times. Neither of them seemed terribly upset at the time, and I don’t think they’ve given it a second thought since then.

A curious thing that I had noticed over the years was that the fish popped up fairly frequently in my dreams. In these dreams, the situation was almost always the same: the fish were neglected or completely forgotten, only to be rediscovered. When I found them in my dream, I was always surprised that they were still alive in spite of the lack of food or water or whatever they’d been suffering through.

Here’s an example of a dream from a couple of years ago:

I had been given a fish tank by someone (previous owners of the house?). It was a very fancy setup – a large aquarium that had several smaller aquariums in it. I realized that I’d been neglecting the fish for weeks. Some of the fish had already died, and others were either starving or in such shallow pools of water that they could barely move. I started trying to fix one of the smaller aquariums, but I couldn’t figure out how the pump worked.

Of course, in a dream, a fish is not necessarily a fish. The fish as a symbol, particulary in Christianity, has a lot of meaning. The ‘Jesus fish’ can be found on the back of many vehicles today. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys for some very interesting reading.

In doing a bit of research about fish in dreams, I came across http://www.dreamanalysis.info/ , a Jungian psychology site. They have a fish symbol as their logo, and the following paragraph that explains this choice:

The fish is an age old symbol and one which frequently appears within dreams. Within the dream the fish tends to represent that which is formed yet remains unconscious. Catching a fish is to pull from out of the waters of the unconscious onto the dry land of ones conscious mind. The fish and fishing can also represent the process of dreaming and dream analysis itself.

My dreams may have been telling me that I’m not paying enough attention to developing these unconscious ideas, or perhaps that I’m neglecting the messages that are being communicated through my dreams.

Speaking of Jung (one of my favourite subjects), here’s another dream that had fish in it, and interestingly, Jung himself makes an appearance:

I’m in a park with Carl Jung and a person who has been looking after him in his old age. I’m disappointed to see that Jung is not aging very well – the psychological foundation that he built for himself has failed him now, and he has reverted to child-like behaviour and is a significant burden on the other person. At one point he soils himself, and then gets mad at his caretaker for ignoring him when he was trying to get his/her attention about it. I feel a bit guilty that he felt ignored, much like I would upon realizing that I’d been ignoring Drew or Owen when they were trying to get my attention. The caretaker points out that Jung loved the goldfish that are in the ponds in the park, and I look closely at them. They are huge – 18 inches long or so. Some of them are wallowing in the shallow parts of the ponds. There are also some other, darker, fish of about the same size.

This is a very interesting dream to me. From what I’ve read of Jung’s later years, he was a very serene and content person, which is in stark contrast to this dream. I’ve been reading a lot of his writing over the past couple of years, and I guess this dream indicates a reluctance on my part to fully trust his philosophy. I think you should always approach things with some degree of skepticism. Perhaps I was consciously becoming a bit too enthralled with Jung’s ideas at the time, and my unconscious sent me this message to back off a bit and consider the merits of the ideas carefully. Or it may not be specific to Jung himself. He could represent the “wise old man” archetype, in which case the warning might be about the danger of taking anyone’s ideas as your own without questioning them thoroughly, regardless of the wisdom that that person (or group of people) may posess. Wisdom is not easily come by, and it makes a lot of sense to pay close attention to what a wise person says, but you should never do it blindly.

But what about the fish in this dream? Jung did plenty of writing on the fish as a symbol, so it’s not surprising that the caretaker told me of his love for the goldfish in the pond. If the fish represent unconscious ideas, perhaps the dream is telling me that I’m getting to know the “gold”-coloured ones (i.e. pleasing to the eye) that are floating near the surface, but the real benefit will come from digging even deeper, to the “dark” ones that are not as accessible (and likely, not as pleasant). Interesting stuff.