In several living folk traditions a fish dream is a pregnancy omen: in Korean dream lore a carp or a fish caught and held is among the classic conception dreams, the taemong reported to expectant families, and fish carry similar news in Turkish and other folk registers. The logic is old and visible, the fish as the most fertile of creatures, spawning in uncountable numbers, living hidden in the element the traditions everywhere associate with origin. The old handbooks read fish toward gain and plenty on the same ground, a good catch being the plainest image of livelihood the ancient shorelines had.
Religious symbolism gave the fish a second career: the ichthys of the early Christians, the loaves and fishes, the apostles as fishers of men, and in South Asia the fish avatar of Vishnu who saves the first man from the flood. The fish as what is drawn up from the deep to feed became common property of the traditions.
Jung built his most sustained symbol study around exactly that: in Aion he follows the fish through Christian and alchemical history, reading the dream fish as a content of the unconscious, alive in the depths, glimpsed, caught or lost, nourishing when landed. The popular dictionaries compress this to insight and abundance. As throughout this atlas, the readings belong to their traditions; the catch is checking which tradition the dreamer's fish swam out of.