Natalie's comments on bathroom dreams
Hi all,
In anticipation of the Eyes Wide Shut tangent and all the Jungian stuff therein, I was curious about this subreddit's thoughts on a related (I insist) topic. In a recent stream, Natalie mentioned that she occasionally has dreams involving bizarre, even mazelike bathrooms. She speculated that there might be something subconscious there related to being trans and the cultural shitshorm around trans people in restrooms. While that might be true, I wanted to float something else that I think really ought to be given a look through the Junging glass.
The labyrinthine, even disgusting bathroom dreams seem to be a relative old phenomenon. I remember being a young, elementary school aged child in the mid 2000s and having recurring dreams of being lost and trying to navigate grimy, spatially disturbed bathrooms. Stalls up to the the walls or as short as my knees, toilets at odd angles, terraced sinks. Each bathroom maze dream showed a new bathroom insofar as tile or geometry went, and there was no mental contiguity of "Oh, this again." But I emphasize that this House of Leaves ass bathroom experience was frequent and early. If I can trust my own memory, that means this experience predates the Backrooms, Liminal core in general, etc: it's not some internet-inspired dream trope, like a dream set in Skyrim or the Severance bathroom.
I'm not the only one. Check out /r/ThatBathroomMazeDream, which seems to go back at least six years. That's not early enough to prove that this dream trope precedes the recent stylistic boom around liminality, but I haven't looked hard.
This all smells Jungian, but I have not read a word of Jung and am wary to go beyond that. I will probably sit down some day and really put elbow grease into this, but in the mean time, I'll ask other people to do my thinking for me. If bathroom maze dreams are some strange yet consistent trope bubbling out of the human subconscious, well, why? Tiled bathrooms and toilets are not fixtures of the Earth and most of the people who have ever lived never had any exposure to a public restroom. So what is the period-appropriate analogue of a bathroom maze dream? Did nostalgia-afflicted Swiss mercenaries have horrible dreams of battlefield latrines? Did Romans get lost in endless bathhouses? Did cavemen dream of the shithole? We may never know, unless a historian of dreams somewhere knows of a primary text describing such a thing.
What do you all think? What is the subconscious, animal-derived, bubbling psychic bullshit that attaches itself to grotesque bathroom aesthetics in the 21st century? Why bathrooms? Why mazes?