Bed wetting in a dream: what does it mean?
A distressing and extremely common childhood experience, and one of the few dream subjects where the plain physical explanation should come first and stay first.
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.
Freud
Freud discussed this directly and treated the dream of finding a lavatory as the mind's attempt to keep the sleeper asleep. His broader interpretations of it are among the parts of his work that have aged worst.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung, where it persists in an adult, the shame rather than the act tends to be the material, and the dream frequently supplies witnesses who were not there.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
This should be said plainly. Bed wetting in children is very common, is a developmental matter rather than a behavioural one, and is not caused by anything a child or a parent has done wrong. It usually resolves, effective help exists, and a doctor is the right first stop. In adults it warrants medical attention rather than interpretation.
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.Mythological
Folk remedies for this are numerous, largely useless, and frequently punitive, which is worth recording as a caution rather than as a tradition to draw on.
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.
In literature
Childhood writing that handles this honestly is rare and valuable, because the shame is real, disproportionate and almost never discussed.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It is one of the few subjects that can show a child's interior life under pressure without any external event. Structurally it belongs in the domestic, not the dramatic.
Genre conventions
Children's writing mostly avoids it. Literary fiction uses it for the parent's reaction, which is the real subject. Memoir handles it best, because it can afford to be unresolved.
How to subvert it
Write the parent who gets it exactly right, calmly, at three in the morning, for the ninetieth time.
Try this
Write a child changing their own sheets in the dark so nobody finds out. No commentary.
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.