Urine in a dream: what does it mean?
One of the most common physical causes of a dream, and one of the very few where the body is straightforwardly writing the plot.
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?
Freud recorded these directly and treated them as among the clearest cases of a bodily state producing a dream: the dreamer needs to go, the dream builds a lavatory, and the lavatory turns out to be unusable so that the sleeper is not woken. He thought the dream was protecting sleep.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading would have little quarrel with the physical explanation here and would likely accept it, which is worth noting, since not every image needs a second layer.
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?
The unfindable or unusable toilet is one of the most widely reported dreams there is, and the ordinary explanation is almost always the right one. If you are waking to go several times a night, or if this is new, that is worth mentioning to a doctor, since it has straightforward causes that are worth ruling out.
Our summary of the typical-dreams literature. See Nielsen et al., The typical dreams of Canadian university students (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Urine was a serious industrial material for centuries, collected by the bucket for fulling cloth, tanning leather and making saltpetre, and Roman emperors taxed the trade. The phrase about money not smelling comes from Vespasian's answer when his son objected to the tax.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after 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?
The urine tax and Vespasian holding a coin under his son's nose is a real anecdote and one of the better ones available about where money comes from.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The body writing the dream directly.
What are the genre conventions?
A comic scene, or an anxiety dream played for recognition.
How to subvert it
Write the collectors, and the pots left outside houses for them.
Try this
Two hundred words about an industry built on something free.
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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