Urinating

The quickest reading is the one that dismisses the dream entirely: your bladder is full, your body is talking to your sleep, roll over and wake up. The next-quickest says you are “releasing emotions” and leaves it there, which explains nothing. Neither stays with what the dream actually stages, and the dream is oddly specific about it. There is the endless search for a bathroom that has no walls, no door, no privacy; the toilet exposed in the middle of a room full of people; the humiliation of wetting yourself where you can be seen; the stream that will not stop, or will not start; and the plain, enormous relief of finally going. Sometimes there is blood in it, and a jolt of fear. If urgency or blood is a waking pattern in your body, that is a question for a clinician, not a dream dictionary — but the dream itself is not reading your bladder. It is reading the image, and the tradition treats this image with a reverence that will surprise you.

Start with that reverence, because it is old and nearly universal. Edward Whitmont, drawing on Havelock Ellis’s study of “Urethral Eroticism,” notes the “emotional, sacral and magical significance of urine” — that it appears as “water par excellence,” and that “it is even sacred water” (Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest, 1969). Jung records the same instinct at the root of culture: “everything coming from the body — hair, excrement, urine, or saliva” was regarded by early peoples “as creative, as having magical powers” (Jung, Man and His Symbols, 1964). What the modern bathroom has made merely hygienic, the older imagination held as potent water — the body’s own spring, charged with the self that made it.

That charge begins, like so much, in childhood, as pride before it is ever shame. Karl Abraham describes the small boy’s frank delight in his own stream — a boy at the seaside who urinated whenever a wave came in, explaining “so that there shall be a whole lot of water,” matching his body’s flood to the sea’s (Abraham, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927). To give a bodily product, Abraham found, “signifies: ‘I am giving you a part of myself, something that is very precious to me.’” The stream is a performance and an offering, a first display of power and generosity at once. Which is exactly why the dream of losing that control — wetting yourself, the flood you cannot govern — cuts so deep. It is the underside of the same pride: the body doing in the open what the self swore it had mastered.

And under the shame runs an older current: release as cleansing, the flood that carries off what was clogged. Freud dreamed it about himself, grandly. On a hill heaped with “faeces of all sizes,” he “micturated on the seat; a long stream of urine” that washed the filth away and left everything clean — and in the analysis he recognized the Augean stables scoured out by Hercules: “This Hercules was I” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900). The urine dream is often this: the great clearing stream, the pressure finally let go, the backed-up matter of a life carried off in one relieving flood. Karen Signell records a version aimed at a fire rather than a filth — a woman’s dream of a giant who sprayed urine to put out a blaze, and who woke certain “that the giant in the dream did the right thing (spraying urine)” and that she “needed to ‘put out the fire’” of a relationship burning her family down (Signell, Wisdom of the Heart, 1991). Sometimes the stream in the dream is quenching a fire you could not put out awake.

The alchemists, predictably, went furthest. They gave the prima materia — the base matter that begins the whole transformation — the frank name of children’s urine, and drew the “pissing manikin” into their emblems. “The urine of children,” one of their texts insists, “is the seed and the first principle of metals. Without this seed there is no consummation of our Art” (Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998). Marie-Louise von Franz reads the strange choice exactly: the “pissing mannikin” and “the urine of an uncorrupted boy” as solvent “relate to the psychological reality that the unconscious is more responsive to the naive and spontaneous attitudes associated with childhood” (von Franz, Alchemy, 1980). What dissolves the hardened, fixed, over-controlled thing is not more control. It is the spontaneous, childlike letting-go the adult has trained out of himself — the very release the dream is staging.

And then there is the opposite motion, the dream that asks not for release but for attention. Hillman reports a patient’s dream — “My urine is to be examined with various chemicals” — and reads it as “psychoanalysis as urinalysis”: the private, internal residue of a life to be separated out and examined “for their quite specific particulars,” an exercise, he says, in “eachness” (Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 2010). Here the stream is not to be let go but caught, dosed, looked at closely — as if the psyche were asking you to notice precisely what it has distilled.

So the urination dream is not about the bathroom, and it is not simply about needing to go. It asks what needs to be released — what pressure you have been holding past the point of holding, what you are ashamed to let flow, what fire is burning that only a flood will put out. And it treats even this, in the oldest reckoning, as sacred water: the childlike, dissolving, clearing stream, the water par excellence that scours the stable and quenches the blaze. The dream is not embarrassing you. It is asking whether you will finally let go of what you have been unable to release — or, sometimes, whether you will stop and look, at last, at what your own depths have distilled.