---
title: "Poop"
symbol: "poop"
pill_slug: "poop"
concordance: ["the shadow", "prima materia", "the body", "the underworld"]
seo_title: "Poop Dreams: Shame, Waste, and the Gold in the Base Matter"
seo_description: "Dreaming of poop, read past the money superstition and the disgust — the alchemists' gold hidden in the base matter, the child's first gift, and what you flush."
---
There are two dictionaries for this one, and both look away from the thing itself. The folk version, cheerful and mercenary, says poop in a dream means money is coming — as if the psyche kept a ledger and paid out in the night. The fastidious version says it is about shame, embarrassment, something dirty you want to hide. Neither can bear to stay in the room with the image. But the dream will not be hurried past it. There is the desperate hunt for a toilet that is never private, never clean, never there; the bowl that overflows or backs up; the mess that spreads; the horror of having soiled yourself where others can see. The tradition does something almost nobody else will do with this material: it stops, looks straight at the most shamed substance a body makes, and calls it the place where the gold is hidden.

Begin before the shame, because there was a time before it. Karl Abraham, tracing the child's earliest economy, shows that this is the first thing that is unmistakably one's own — the first possession, and the first gift. Long before money, a proof of love and a gift are almost the same thing to a child, and "within certain limits the child repays its mother's 'gift' by a 'gift' in return — it regulates its bodily evacuations" as an offering (Abraham, *Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis*, 1927). Then the world teaches disgust, and the gift is revalued as garbage. In the later stage, Abraham writes, "excrement becomes for him the representative of everything that he does not want to keep," the very emblem of rejection — so completely that a person one despises gets identified, in the unconscious, "with disgust with feces." This is the whole hinge of the image. What was once the freely given treasure becomes the thing you refuse, expel, and will not look at. The dream of poop is a dream about that revaluation — about something that was yours, and was good, and got flushed.

The alchemists made the child's forgotten knowledge into a doctrine, and Jung recovered it. Reading a patient's strange reverence for the lowest matter, he pauses to "mention the intimate connection between excrement and gold: the lowest value allies itself to the highest" (Jung, *Symbols of Transformation*, 1952). The alchemists hunted the *prima materia* — the raw, despised stuff from which the whole transformation had to begin — in the basest substance of all, insisting that the philosopher's stone *in stercore invenitur*, that it is found in the dung. The treasure was hidden exactly in what everyone throws away. And Jung records the dream that says it outright: a "very religiously brought-up" patient once "dreamt that she saw the Crucifix formed of excrement on the bottom of a blue-flowered chamber-pot." The highest image the woman knew, assembled from the lowest matter there is. The contrast is so total, Jung notes, that childhood must simply value things differently than we do — and, he adds, "so, indeed, they are."

Jung had met this collision in himself, as a boy, in the most frightening thought of his life. Dazzled by the sun on the glittering roof of the cathedral, imagining God on his golden throne above the beautiful world, he felt a forbidden image trying to come and fought it off for days in an agony of dread — until he let it arrive, and saw God let fall an enormous turd that shattered the sparkling roof and broke the cathedral open. Lewis Hyde reads the vision precisely: the sterile purity — "the roof of the cathedral glittered" — "must be mixed with dirt," and the dirt is a particular kind: "it is a divine turd that falls" (Hyde, *Trickster Makes This World*, 1998). What broke the boy's airless perfection was not more light. It was the sacred arriving as the defiling — the one thing his clean religion could not hold, falling from the throne of God.

This is why the specifically excremental dream carries such force, and here James Hillman is the surest guide, because he takes the toilet dream literally and reads it down. "Toilet dreams," he writes — "those in which there is an immediate need to defecate, or a backed-up sewer and fecal flood, or an embarrassing, frustrating search midst others for 'a place to go,' or the discovery that one has soiled oneself, and the like — can be read as underworld initiations. These are indeed death experiences for the dayworld ego, whose cleanliness is next to its Godlike-ness" (Hillman, *The Dream and the Underworld*, 1979). The ego that runs the daylight prides itself on being clean, presentable, in control; the toilet dream is where that ego is humbled and taken down. What the clean self clamps shut, the dream lets go: in Hillman's phrase, "what was held back is spewed forth," and "we are released into the repressed." The mortifying loss of control is the release. The mess is the opening.

So the poop dream is not a lottery ticket and not merely disgust. It asks a harder question than either dictionary will: what have you declared worthless and flushed? What part of yourself did you decide was dirty, refuse to keep, expel, and identify with the people you cannot stand — the anger, the appetite, the neediness, the raw stuff that the clean daylight self will not carry? The tradition's answer is consistent and strange. That discarded matter is not garbage. It is the *prima materia*, the base substance the whole work has to start from, the dung in which the stone is found. The dream is not telling you money is coming. It is handing you back the thing you flushed and asking whether you are ready, at last, to see what it was made of.