What Does Dreaming About an Eel Mean?

Psychologically, the eel is the very image of the slippery and elusive — smooth, sinuous, and impossible to grasp, slipping through your fingers the moment you try to hold it. So it most often touches the slippery, elusive, and hard to grasp: something (or someone) that evades being pinned down, slips away, is hard to get hold of, or won't be caught or grasped — an elusive situation, a slippery person, or a feeling or truth you can't quite seize.

This carries several charges. As slipperiness and evasiveness, the eel touches the elusive and evasive — a 'slippery' person who can't be pinned down or trusted, a situation that keeps slipping away, or something that evades your grasp. As the hidden and lurking, eels hide in the depths, mud, and crevices — so the eel touches the hidden, the lurking, and what stays out of sight in the depths (of emotion or the unconscious). As snake-like, primal energy, the eel's serpentine form in the water touches a primal, instinctive energy moving in the waters of emotion (with some of the snake's charge). As a sudden shock, the electric eel can touch a sudden, shocking jolt. Whether the eel slips away from your grasp, lurks in the depths, delivers a shock, or is caught usually mirrors the slippery and elusive (a person, situation, or feeling you can't grasp), the hidden and lurking in the depths, a snake-like primal energy in the water of emotion, and a sudden shock.

A Freudian reading would attend to the eel as the smooth, sinuous, slippery creature of the depths — serpentine and impossible to grasp, lurking in the mud and crevices, carrying (like the snake) a phallic and primal charge, and the evasiveness of what slips away. The eel can embody the slippery and ungraspable, the lurking in the depths, and the serpentine, primal energy moving in the waters of feeling.

Its slipperiness and its lurking carry the charge of the ungraspable and of the hidden. What the eel evokes — the frustration of what slips away, the unease of what lurks in the depths, the serpentine charge of its form — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to the elusive and the hidden: the slippery, ungraspable person, feeling, or situation, the lurking in the depths, and the serpentine, primal energy moving beneath the surface of emotion.

While the eel falls among the creatures Scripture deems unclean (water creatures without fins and scales), it touches the tradition's themes of the slippery and the hard to grasp — the warning against the slippery and deceitful ('the words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart'), and the elusive ('slippery ways'). The eel's slipperiness touches this theme of the smooth, slippery, and not to be trusted.

An eel dream, read in this light, can touch the slippery, the elusive, the hidden, or the not-to-be-trusted. A biblical sensibility might weigh the eel as an image of the slippery and ungraspable — and recall the caution against the smooth and deceitful (words 'smoother than butter, but war was in his heart') and 'slippery ways' — reading the dream as a prompt to discern the slippery and elusive (a person or situation not to be trusted or easily grasped), and to seek firm, honest ground rather than the slippery and deceptive.

In Islamic sensibility the eel is among the creatures of the sea (with some scholarly discussion of it), and it touches the recognizable themes of the slippery and elusive, the hidden lurking in the depths, and a caution about the slippery and not-to-be-trusted. The eel evokes the slippery and elusive, the hidden, and a caution about what cannot be firmly grasped or trusted.

An eel dream, in this frame, might point to the slippery and elusive (a person, situation, or feeling hard to grasp), the hidden and lurking, or a caution. Held with humility, it can invite discernment of the slippery and elusive in one's life — a person or matter that won't be pinned down or trusted, or a truth that slips away — and a seeking of firm, honest, trustworthy ground, met with patience and discernment rather than frustration at what evades the grasp.

In a Hindu frame the eel, serpentine and moving sinuously in the waters, touches kinship with the serpent (naga) energy and the primal, sinuous force moving in the waters of emotion and the depths, as well as the slippery and elusive. The eel evokes serpentine, primal energy in the waters, and the slippery and elusive.

An eel dream, in this frame, can point to the slippery and elusive, the hidden and lurking in the depths, a serpentine primal energy, or something hard to grasp. The tradition's note attends to the serpentine and the elusive: the eel as kin to the serpentine (naga) energy moving sinuously in the depths of the waters of emotion, and as an image of the slippery and ungraspable — an invitation to recognize the elusive and slippery in one's life (and the primal energy moving in the depths), met with awareness and discernment rather than a frustrated grasping at what won't be held.