Feces in a dream: what does it mean?
One of the dreams people are most reluctant to look up, and one of the most common. It usually points to what you want rid of, or to something private becoming visible.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
This is the image Freud is most associated with and most caricatured for. He linked it to an early stage of development and to attitudes about control, holding on and letting go, and to money, which he thought often inherited the same feeling. Whatever one makes of the theory, the connection to control is worth holding.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
For Jung the material can image what the psyche is finished with, and the dream question is whether the dreamer can let it go or is caught handling it. Disgust here often marks something the waking self has disowned.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
In continuity terms these dreams often follow waking preoccupation with mess, exposure or losing control in public, and sometimes simply follow a full bladder. The plain physical reading should be considered before the symbolic one.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Folk custom is oddly consistent that stepping in it is lucky, and manure has carried associations with fertility and wealth in agricultural traditions for as long as those traditions have existed. The waste is also the fertiliser.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Brewer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
Swift wrote about it deliberately and repeatedly to puncture idealisation, most famously in the poems about Celia, and the shock still works three centuries on because the taboo has not moved.
Swift, The Lady's Dressing Room (1732). Public domain.What does it do in a story?
It is the fastest way to strip dignity from a scene, which makes it useful and easy to overuse. Its narrative function is levelling: nobody is impressive while dealing with it, which is why so much writing about illness and infancy needs it.
What are the genre conventions?
Comedy uses it for humiliation. Literary fiction uses it for the body's insistence, particularly in writing about care and old age, where it is often the most honest thing on the page. Most genres avoid it entirely.
How to subvert it
Write it without embarrassment, from inside a job where it is routine. A nurse, a farmer, a parent. Competence removes the joke and leaves something much harder to look away from.
Try this
Write a scene of one character cleaning up after another, with no dialogue and no interiority. Let the reader work out the relationship from how carefully it is done.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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