Stranded whale
A great sea-creature beached on land — a presence whose scale is wrong for the medium it has come to rest in.
A stranded whale in a dream is the dream's image of a great being whose scale was honest in its element and is fatal out of it. The whale on land is not smaller than the whale in the sea; the land cannot support the size. The dream brings the stranded whale when something in your life — a large ambition, a complex person, a piece of long work — has been taken out of the medium it lived in and is now visibly being killed by the wrong context. A whale guided back into deep water is the dream affirming that the rescue was possible and timely. A whale still on the sand at midday is the dream noting that the medium-mistake has gone past the window, and the size that was a gift in the sea is now what is breaking the creature under its own weight.