Bathrooms and Toilets | Dream Meanings
You desperately need the toilet but your bathroom is packed full of people from grade school, all the stalls are missing doors, and there’s no toilet paper to be found! You decide to try and hold it… Suddenly, you wake up safe in your bed with a sigh of relief… Bathroom dreams can seem pretty weird but they actually have a LOT of meaning and purpose so let’s talk about ‘em!
The Symbolism of Bathrooms and Toilets in Dreams
We're actually going to begin by talking about food, which is what ends up in the toilet.
Food is symbolic of what we take into ourselves: ideas, experiences, emotions—essentially everything we absorb from the world around us.
In the waking world we ingest food to power our bodies and, like power, food in dreams represents what energizes the mind. Just like physical food, our brains take in new ideas and experiences, break them down into digestible bits, retain the important parts as memory, and release the waste or the parts that no longer serve us.
In dreams, going to the bathroom and using the toilet represents what we are releasing and how that release is going for us.
The Purpose Behind Bathroom Dreams
In the example from the first line of this article, there’s something on the dreamer’s mind that they’re trying to let go of or move past but, ultimately, they end up holding onto it. This dream is showing the dreamer what they’re doing in waking life and why they’re doing it, while trying to help them consciously acknowledge and resolve it.
When the dreamer wakes from this dream they understand that there’s something they’re holding onto unnecessarily… but what is it?
Identifying the What
This is where the other pieces of the dream come in handy for interpretation so it’s time to start asking questions.
The people from grade school suggest that what they need to release could have something to do with childhood, a learning environment/something the dreamer is currently learning, or something their peers (at work, school, or socially) may see.
The missing stall doors suggest that the dreamer could feel exposed or like everyone might watch and/or judge them for what they will release or how they might release it.
Lastly, the lack of toilet paper suggests that it won’t be a clean process and, because the release might be messy, the dreamer has been holding it in.
Identifying the Why
After identifying and thinking about all of these pieces, the dreamer identifies the what as a work project.
They were assigned a task that they don’t know how to do but accepted it anyways. The dreamer thought they could learn how to do it on the fly but learning how to do this is proving difficult on their own (the people from grade school).
They want to come clean and ask for help on the project but their peers and boss might judge them for it and they feel completely exposed in this shitty situation (the missing stall doors). They can’t complete the project and they don’t want to ask for help but something needs to be done, either way the situation might be messy (lack of TP).
The Application
The dream is identifying what needs to be released and showing the dreamer all of the different factors. This is, unfortunately, one of those situations the dreamer just needs to get through. It’s time to either ask for help or admit that they can’t complete the project and pass it on to someone who can.
Once they choose what to do and act on it, the dreamer can move forward and eventually the situation will stop taking up so much mental and emotional bandwidth, fading into memory.
Other Scenarios
Outside of the example for this article some other bathroom dream scenarios might look like:
Not being able to find a bathroom at all = unsure of how to release or don’t have options
Actually using the toilet in the dream = depicts how you are currently releasing something
Toilets out of order or looking for a toilet but only finding a urinal = unsupportive environment, access, or lacking the tools to release something
Bathroom Dreams for Relief
Bathroom dreams are all about finding relief. If there’s something you’ve been holding onto or something that’s eating away at you, your bathroom dreams are trying to help you avoid resentment by embracing relief.
So the next time you dream about using the toilet, take a second to ask yourself what you’ve been holding onto and how you can release it.
