Salted fish
Preserved fish — a once-fresh catch kept usable across distance and time.
Salted fish in a dream is the dream's image of a once-fresh catch kept usable across distance and time. The salt is a trade-off — the fish loses softness, the fish stays edible. The dream brings salted fish when something in your life — a friendship across continents, a skill carried out of its original season, a piece of news kept for later telling — has been preserved by a method that changed the original. A salted fish eaten with gratitude is the dream telling you the preservation was worth its cost. A salted fish thrown out because it is no longer what it was is the dream noting that the preservation succeeded and the keeper has remembered only the loss.