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The fish that makes dreams.

Except it probably is not the fish. And that is the most interesting sentence on this page.

In 2006, a man in his forties ate a fish for dinner near Saint-Tropez.

He spent the next thirty-six hours hallucinating. Not queasy, not unwell in the ordinary food-poisoning way. Hallucinating, badly enough to seek help, and long enough that it was written up.

In 1994 a ninety-year-old man had much the same experience from much the same meal.

The fish was Sarpa salpa, the salema porgy. It is a common Mediterranean seabream. It is sold in markets. It is not exotic, not restricted, and not rare.

The condition has a name, which tells you it happens often enough to need one: ichthyoallyeinotoxism.

Sarpa salpa, the salema porgy. Common, unremarkable, and sold in markets. Martijn Klijnstra, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The recordOlder than you would think

Pliny the Elder knew about it. The Arabic name for the fish translates as roughly the fish that makes dreams, which is a better name than anything science has managed since.

From Cuvier and Valenciennes, Histoire naturelle des poissons. Catalogued long before anyone asked why it did that. Buffon, Cuvier, Valenciennes, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Reports also cluster around Kyphosus species near Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, half a world away from the Mediterranean, which is a hint worth holding on to.

The twistIt is not the fish

Here is the part that reframes the whole book.

Sarpa salpa is not a psychoactive animal. It has no interest in altering anyone's consciousness and no equipment for doing so. The leading explanation is that the fish accumulates compounds from the algae it grazes on.

Which explains everything that is otherwise strange about it. Why the effect is seasonal. Why it is regional. Why two people can eat the same species in the same week and only one of them ends up seeing things. The fish is not the source. The fish is the delivery.

Now put that next to the honey.

Honey: a flower makes a defensive toxin, a bee carries it into a jar, a human eats it.

Fish: an alga makes a compound, a fish eats the alga, a human eats the fish.

Same mechanism. Opposite direction. Neither the bee nor the fish has any stake in the outcome.

Filed in 1959 under a single word: Dreamfishes. Touring Club Italiano, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The chemistry passed through an entire organism without belonging to it.

And once you have seen that twice, the categories start to look less solid than they did. Plant, animal, food, drug. Those are our words. We drew those lines, and we drew them for our own convenience. The chemistry does not respect them and never agreed to.

That is the most humbling and the most wonderful thing in this entire book.

The honest part

This is not a recommendation, and it would be a poor plan even if it were.

The reported experiences are largely described as unpleasant — frightening rather than illuminating, and lasting a day and a half whether you are enjoying it or not. It is unpredictable by nature, since nobody can tell you what any particular fish has been grazing on. And it arrives with the ordinary risks of eating a fish that is disagreeing with you.

It is a wonderful thing to know about. It is a bad dinner.

The fish that makes dreams

Nothing about this animal looks like it should be able to do what it occasionally does.

A shoal off the Croatian coast. Anders Finn Jørgensen, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
A shoal off Catania, Sicily. Diego Delso, delso.photo, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
One fish, close. Nothing about it suggests what it occasionally does. Diego Delso, delso.photo, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Arrábida, Portugal. Common right across the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic. Diego Delso, delso.photo, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
A shoal working the rocks. They graze, which is where the whole story starts. Paolo Gamba, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
On the plate. This is how almost every recorded case begins. Prof.lumacorno, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The second of the 1959–60 Dreamfishes photographs. Touring Club Italiano, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The habitat. Whatever it grazes on is where the chemistry actually comes from. CofreDeSofre, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

A note on the numbers below. Doses and timings are reported from the published clinical and toxicological literature, and they are here so you can read a headline or a trip report accurately. This is education, not instruction, and it is not medical advice.

EXPERIENCE

Salema porgy

You do not take this one on purpose. Ichthyoallyeinotoxism is food poisoning that hallucinates, caused by toxins Sarpa salpa accumulates from the algae it grazes, concentrated in the head and the guts. Onset comes within a few hours of the meal, and the best-documented cases resolved at around 36 hours.

The stages

  1. 0–3 hoursThe Meal

    Mild digestive trouble and nothing whatsoever to suggest what is coming.

  2. 3–24 hoursThe Night

    Vivid and frightening visual and auditory hallucinations. Nightmares that carry on after waking. The reported cases describe screaming animals and the sense of being pursued.

  3. 24–36 hoursThe Blank

    It fades. In the best-documented case the man could not recall the hallucinatory period at all.

Core sensory and psychological effects

  • Frightening by default. Almost uniquely on this site, nobody describes a salema experience as beautiful. The content is dark and it does not negotiate.
  • Auditory hallucination. Sounds and voices, which is rarer than the visual kind in the classical psychedelics.
  • Delirium, not psychedelia. Confusion and disorientation. Much closer to a high fever than to a mushroom.
  • Amnesia. Recall of the episode is often patchy and sometimes entirely absent.
  • Actual food poisoning. Underneath all of it, this is still something you ate disagreeing with you.
Good

Essentially nothing, unless you count the story. This one is here because it is real, not because it is fun.

Bad

Terrifying hallucinations, nightmares, disorientation, and 36 hours you did not choose and may not remember.

The Romans reportedly ate it deliberately. Two men in the south of France, in 1994 and in 2002, did not, and the write-up of their nights in Clinical Toxicology is the reason anybody can say anything definite about it at all.

Chapter Five is the shortest chapter in the book and, for a lot of readers, the one they bring up first. The full case reports are in there, along with what the algae hypothesis still cannot account for.

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