Toilet dreams

“Shit is good!” The elderly Italian grocery store owner’s eyes twinkled as she bagged tomatoes and homemade pasta for me. “If you crap in your dreams, it means money.”

Her reading is an ancient one, still alive in many family traditions. Josefina had carried it with her from Sicily. The association between excrement and wealth isn’t silly, when we remember that gold and silver come from under the earth, the repository of night soil. One of the names of Hades, the Greek lord of the Underworld, is Ploutos (Roman Pluto) which means The Wealthy. 

Sometimes our dream producers make the link impossible to miss. I once dreamed I was on the potty and produced a gusher. What might have been an explosion of diarrhea was a great burst of liquid gold. I woke laughing, feeling a happy release and also a terrific sense of possibility.

As with any dream symbol, the excrement in your dream isn’t necessarily the same as in mine. A good guess, with many dreams of defecation, is that you are eliminating something that needs to come out of your body or your life. To “take a dump”, in a dream, may be to dump what you need to let go. When your feelings tell you that such dreams are positive, they may indicate effective cleansing and releasing, perhaps a return to good health. A bowel movement, in a dream, may herald or accompany a move beyond a blocked or stuck situation. We sometimes say, “I’m feeling constipated” as a metaphor for the sense that things just aren’t coming out of coming through as they should do.

A common variant of the poop dream is one in which we need to go but find ourselves doing it in public. Sometimes this reflects a need for privacy in the dreamer’s life. Sometimes it’s more about whether and when it’s okay to “let it go” in front of others. Guidance on that may come from the reactions of others inside the dream. If other people in the dream don’t seem to notice or mind, that may be telling you it’s okay to let it all out. Let’s remember that in some cultures, going in public was normal bathroom procedure.

Colloquial phrases involving shit or its synonyms may give us a clue to the meaning of a dream of this ilk. Relevant phrases that plop to mind include:

I’m pooped

The shit hit the fan

I’m in deep doodoo

Shit for brains

He/she is a real shit

That’s crap

On the shitlist

Time to shit or get off the pot

This dream theme has been actively discussed for as long as people have been dreaming and needing to go. Some of the best pages in the most famous dream book of the ancient world, the Oneirocritica (“Interpretation of Dreams”) by Artemidorus, are devoted to skatá(the Greek word for shit, from which we derive the term “scatological”). Though I am no fan of dream dictionaries, I have a soft spot for Artemidorus, because he was always careful to note that similar dreams mean very different things according to the varied circumstances of the dreamer, and he checked on incidents that followed a particular dream.

  If you see a lot of human shit in a public place, according to Artemidorus, you won’t be able to accomplish anything there. In general, it doesn’t bode well if someone is shitting on your head. But that depends. “I know of a man who dreamed that a rich friend was defecating over his head. That man received a fortune and was named the heir of his friend.” On the other hand, a man who dreamed he was “befouled with dung by a poor acquaintance” later suffered great damage from the person who shat on him in the dream.

Defecating while in bed is not a good thing in a dream, says Artemidorus; it could mean you’ll be bedridden. It could also mean that your relations with a spouse or partner are in trouble, since the bad has been defiled. On the other hand to defecate copiously while seated on a toilet means “good luck for all men”, including “the alleviation of many cares and all distress. For the body is lightest after it has relieved itself.” It’s also a happy event when you dream you relieve yourself this way at a place in nature, on a road or in a river. Watch out, however, if you dream you are pooping in a temple, a place of commerce, or a public street.

I’m not sure I would be happy if I dreamed that anyone was pooping on my head although some folk traditions maintain that having a bird shit on your head in physical life is a very good omen.

From the profane to the sacred isn't necessarily a long journey. I have noticed that many toilet dreams mark an important transition in the dream experience. They may carry the dreamer out of the dream - in order to pee in the batroom instead of the bed.Alternatively, they may move the dreamer into a deeper and sometimes even magical or mystical space. Here's report form my own journals of a toilet dream that carried me into the realm of the Sufi poets.

July 27, 2009

Dream

Your Beloved Is Calling

I woke at 3:00 AM today from the following dream:

I am at a conference center where they are setting up for lunch in the huge dining area. There are wonderful freshy baked loaves of bread on  fresh white tablecloths. There's a gathering in process that includes a lot of priests or ministers. Also present is an entrepreneur who made a lot of money developing an internet search engine.

 

I receive several messages, as I roam the place, that a Sufi poet has been calling. He wants to get through to a number of people who are here, but they have not been receiving his messages. I am planning to tell the search engine entrepreneur that he needs to develop a device that will alert people when a spiritual teacher is searching for them.

 

I go through the dining area to a men's room. Several of the ministers are washing up. I go into a stall for privacy and find writing inside the door. Instead of graffiti, it is a lovely poem about spiritual union. Go up to the rooftop. Your Beloved is calling.

 

I woke with a sense of delight, and recognition. I thought of Rumi, and also of his spiritual teacher, Shams of Tabriz. I went questing back through old journals, and found my chronicle of nocturnal encounters with figures that appeared to carry this tradition. Over the nights that followed, I found myself traveling to many locales - including a glorious Palace of the Winds - in contact with spiritual teachers.

Photo: from the  Israel Antiquities Authority showing a rare ancient toilet in Jerusalem discovered this year. It dates back more than 2,700 years to an era when private bathrooms were a luxury.The smooth, carved limestone toilet was found in a cabin that was part of a large mansion overlooking what is now the Old City. 

 

Defecation rites among the Azande

A woman postgrad tells me she chose defecation rites among the Azande as the theme for her dissertation. I ask why. She says she wanted to study the same theme among a different tribe, but more had been published on that one. There was a hole in Azande studies she intended to fill.
    I am surprised that the prolific Evans-Pritchard left room for anyone else in coverage of the Azande. I am even more surprised by her focus. Defecation rites?

Feelings after waking with this dream fragment in the early hours: Amusement.

Reality check: I wrote an article once, titled “Excremental Issues” on defecation in contemporary dreams. Many years ago, I read books and articles by Sir Edward “E.E.” Evans-Pritchard, a famous Oxford anthropologist. Regarded as the founder of social anthropology, he did a great deal of fieldwork among the Azande of southern Sudan and became a world authority on witchcraft and sorcery among the peoples of Central Africa. Having immersed himself in the lives of people among whom sorcery is the explanation for many everyday events, he converted later in life to Roman Catholicism. Some suggested that he did this in an effort to close the lid on experiences for which he had no rational explanation.

Action: Yes again, a dream has set me a research assignment, quite a curious one. I pulled out Evans-Pritchard’s book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. I will check whether anything has been published on “defecation rites” among this people. I am curious to see whether scatomancy (divination by excrement) is among their practices. It is often part of folk medicine, and there is an account of this in Augusten Burrough's hilarious memoir Running with Scissors, which I read a few years ago on a plane.

The snapper (or is it the crapper?) is irresistible: “Are you sh-tting me?”

Photo: Evans-Pritchard among the Azande.

Star in the water, and the princess who came back from the toilet

I do a ton of radio interviews. I rate hosts according to their ability to improvise and go with the flow rather than sticking to a script or a set of prepared questions, and also according to whether they have a sense of humor. When the subject is dreams, a very important distinction is between hosts who share personal experiences and those who do not.
    Sandiee Peters, the host of "Soul Chat", gets high marks in the last category. I had fun on her show last night, especially when she recounted two moving dreams of her own.
    At a time she was feeling down and somewhat lacking in confidence, she dreamed she saw a red starfish under the sea, shining like a star in the sky. This filled her with hope and optimism. As she looked again, infused with wonder, she saw many other red starfish in the waters. She woke feeling confident and happy, ready to take on the world. She remembered, "I came out of that dream knowing I am a star."
    We discussed starfish. One of the things Sandiee knew about them is that they grow back. "If they lose an arm, they can grow it back." So one of the qualities of starfish is regeneration. I learned, in some quick overnight research, that some starfish can not only grown back a lost arm; they can even grow a whole new body from a lone surviving arm. Now that is a master regenerator. What a marvelous ally when life calls on us to grow back something hat has been lost or diminished!
    Dreams require action, to embody their energy and guidance. We discussed what Sandiee might do now to celebrate the star of the sea, now it was again shining brightly in her ind. She told me she is going to Puerto Rico, and will look for a red starfish, and keep it close to her.
    This lively discussion led her to recall another dream. "It's a little embarrassing," she began. "I'm looking in a toilet and I see there is a woman down there in the bowl, all folded up." To Sandiee's amazement and delight, the woman now emerged from the toilet bowl, raising herself up to impressive height, and revealed herself as a princess, assured of her power and beauty. On waking, the dreamer felt really good, as if she had received a gift.
    "If this were my dream," I suggested, "I would think about a part of my feminine power that may have been dumped or consigned to the toilet by others but is now rising again, unstoppable. I would want to claim that power, and walk with it, and require others to recognize and respect it."
    Through both of Sandiee's reports, we see the power of dreams to put us back in touch with parts of ourselves that may have been submerged by life, and bring back a royal and shining self.

Photo: Red starfish in Maldives waters by Anne Moulet