Dreaming of excrement : what can this symbol evoke?

What is rejected after keeping the useful

The body does not reject what is bad : it rejects what it has already taken what it could from. It is a remainder of transformation, proof that assimilation took place — and nothing better proves one has been nourished.

Dreams often use this figure for what must be left behind after serving. A relationship from which you learned what you could learn, a trade that formed you, a period with nothing left to take. It is not a failure : it is a cycle completing.

The question it poses is concrete : what in you has finished serving? Those who dream of this are often at the end of a period, and the dream uses the most direct vocabulary it has.

What fertilises

Farmers have always known it : nothing makes things grow better. Manure is a farm's most useful matter, and languages keep the trace of that association between excrement and wealth — sayings often mingle the two.

Dreams constantly play on that reversal, which explains dreamers' surprise : such dreams are rarely unpleasant at the time. What you rejected nourishes something else, and often someone else.

What to remember is your reaction. Disgust says a rejection still under way ; indifference or noticed usefulness say a transformation is already done, and the dream observes rather than announces it.

What you do with it changes the reading

• A rejection without disgust — a cycle completing with nothing troublesome attached.
• Very strong disgust — a rejection still under way, and a part of you resisting what is being left.
• Finding nowhere private — the lack of privacy, a very frequent motif of these dreams.
• Seeing someone you know, or a member of your family, relieving themselves in a public place — may mean that you are enduring this person’s behaviour: a lack of respect towards you, as if they were exposing your private life to others, for example through something they write, film or paint.
• Excrement fertilising soil — what you left behind making something else grow.
• A stain one cannot remove — shame rather than rejection : not the same dream.
• Gold associated with these matters — the reversal sayings and tales have always repeated.
• Seeing excrement everywhere — the feeling of being overwhelmed by what one has not wanted to look at. The alchemists, whom Jung studied at length, advised taking what is trodden underfoot on the dunghill; for Jung, what one refuses to welcome ends up turning against oneself. When this matter invades the whole setting of the dream, resentments, conflicts or fatigue long pushed aside often spill over into all of daily life, and ask to be sorted through rather than avoided.
• Seeing excrement in the armpits — the image brings together two ages of the body. The armpits carry hair which, like pubic hair, appears at puberty: it marks the passage into adult sexuality, and body hair is often associated in dreams with instinct and the animal side of desire. Excrement, for its part, refers to what Freud called the anal stage, around the age of two or three, when the child discovers the pleasure of holding back or letting go, of controlling, of opposing, and the shame of being dirty. Seeing this matter caught in the hair of the armpits evokes a sexuality that has remained partly immature: adult intimacy is still mixed with childhood issues such as control, possessiveness or shame. In a couple, this dream may point to a relationship that has not yet reached maturity, where desire passes through power struggles or bargaining rather than through a true encounter with the other.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology treats these dreams without particular embarrassment : they are frequent, and generally designate a cycle of assimilation completing. It notes that the disgust felt is more instructive than the matter itself, and often designates a resistance to letting something go. Other readings retain the ancient association with fertility and wealth, present in countless sayings.

Jung himself experienced an image of this kind as a child. At twelve, in front of Basel Cathedral, he struggled for several days against a thought he considered sacrilegious, before letting it come: he saw God, seated on his golden throne, let fall onto the cathedral's new roof an enormous turd that shattered its walls. Instead of the damnation he feared, he felt immense relief, which he experienced as grace. This founding experience led him away from a merely inherited religion towards a personal experience of the sacred. It shows that in dreams as in visions, such matter does not only soil: it can break what has become rigid and set free a more personal truth.