Taylor told fellow Portaler (and Navigator) Jenaya Shaw about the dreams. Shaw googled possible meanings and some of the results were “[being] scared to be vulnerable” or to “let go of something.” 

“Her exact words were ‘let some shit go,’” Taylor said.

She’s spoken to ten people who’ve had toilet dreams. The first person she discovered was her sister, whose stall-less bathroom had tiles made of white marble. Their mother has also had toilet dreams.

A thought came to me, something that seemed obviously ridiculous yet believable enough to take into consideration. Semi-seriously, I asked, “Could dreams be hereditary?” 

Taylor laughed. “I don’t think you can inherit dreams. Maybe you can, but I don’t think you’d inherit a toilet dream.” However, she suggested that people who grow up in the same environments and share fears and values are more likely to have similar dreams.

With other dreams, Taylor always doubts that they’re repeating.

“I wake up and I’m like, ‘Whoa, didn’t I have that dream already? Maybe I just dreamed in my dream that I had that dream already.’”

However, she’s had the toilet dreams repeat often enough to recognize them. Especially the “hellish” high school bathroom one. “Why do I have to keep dreaming this over and over again?”

Regardless, Taylor finds dreams amusing. She’s tried keeping a dream journal a couple times but has never stuck with it long enough. She loves asking people about dreams, though, especially the toilet one. “It’s always people that I wouldn’t expect to have had it.”

I happen to be one of them. For me, it’s always a drab public bathroom, sometimes with no stalls but where I’m always alone. There’s a door on the opposite end of the room, which leads to another bathroom, which leads to another bathroom….

“[It’s] like, ‘get me out of here,’” I told Taylor, laughing while shuddering at the memory of the emptiness. “‘What am I doing here?’” 

As it turns out, Taylor’s had that variation as well. She brought up another point: “How many toilets are there gonna be? How many do you need?’’

Good questions that will never be answered.

Tara Wohlleben, another Creative Writing and English student (and Poetry Editor for Portal), has also had toilet dreams. Sometimes the bathrooms have no stalls, some have stalls only two feet high, and some have no toilets at all.

Wohlleben’s dreams are always a fever trip. In one, she went to a friend’s house where there was “a dude who had to be killed.” The man was already dead, chopped to pieces, but he’d started to regenerate.

The logical next step? “I had to burn the house down.”

When she was younger, Wohlleben used to dream about hiding under a table from a dinosaur. Eventually it found her, but it was friendly. 

“When I was little … that was scary, but because of how it ended, that’s a nice little memory now,” she said. 

During Wohlleben’s childhood, her parents kept a boat. As a result, docks and being by the water frequently appear in her dreams. The motifs’ meanings change depending on the dream, with the docks either being a place of playtime and fun or a safe space from something in the water.

In one very strange dream, Wohlleben went to a friend’s house and wanted to swim in their pool. The way the house was set up, however, the pool was right by the ocean and very skinny docks. She tried sweeping them and ended up falling into the water. “That [dream] was fine, but it was like, ‘I want to go to the pool. Why would they have both?’”

(Dream logic, I guess.)  

Wohlleben enjoys both kinds of dreams. “It’s like, ‘Oh, nice that I go to see that’ or ‘I think this is a reoccurring dream, but I can’t remember the last time I had it, so it’s nice that I remember it now.’”

I’ve had similar experiences where I dream about places I used to live, such as the houses in Wadena, Vernon, and Kelowna. I’ve also repeatedly dreamed about sitting in our family van, driving past large Ukrainian Catholic churches that either were or resembled real-life churches in Saskatoon and Yorkton.

Wohlleben briefly dipped her toes into lucid dreaming. One thing she learned was, “The more that you recognize that you’re dreaming, the more you recognize dreams, and … you’ll be better able to lucid dream.”

Apart from three incidents, Wohlleben has never been conscious of her state or actions within dreams. Two weeks before the interview, she had a dream in which she said, “This is real life. No way this is a dream.” Upon waking up, she asked herself, “How did I think that?” 

In another dream, someone was trying to kill Wohlleben in her house. She said to herself, “Wait a second. No, I’m not going to be stressed out.” So she opened the door and invited the would-be killer in for tea.

The final dream ended less successfully. The light switches weren’t working, and Wohlleben realized, “Wait, this is a dream. I can do anything I want!” She got so excited that she woke up. Apparently, that’s part of lucid dreaming: “If you wake up in a dream … don’t freak out, or you’re gonna wake up [in real life]!”

Wohlleben has kept a dream journal since May 18, 2016. You can read an excerpt of it in this month’s issue. The dreams themselves aren’t always consistent. “I’ll go a couple of months without remembering any dreams solidly enough to write [them] down, and then I’ll have two months of crazy dreams.” 

Wohlleben enjoys sharing her dreams and gauging listeners’ reactions, even if they find them too bizarre. “They’re like, ‘Hmm, okay, sure. Don’t talk to me again.’”

It’s one of her favorite topics to discuss and something more people should share. “I’ve seen people [say], ‘Nobody wants to hear about your dreams.’ But whenever people talk about their dreams, it’s interesting and fun, so I think [they] should talk about their dreams more.”

Let’s step things up a notch and discuss the dream multiverse. 

Think something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where different versions of ourselves exist in different times, places, and realities. But more importantly, some of these versions are dreaming of us in our present awake reality, and in other versions they’re our dream-selves but awake. 

This means anything we’re doing at this moment—editing this piece, reading it once it’s been published—is also being dreamt about by another version of ourselves, either in the distant past or in the distant future!

If this all sounds meta to you, don’t worry. You’re not the only one.

I first learned of this concept from Creative Writing student and Poetry Editor Laurent Lemay. “It’s less something I’ve experienced before but more something I have dreamt before,” he explained. “I find comfort in that it was in my dreams and that now, it is exactly where I’m meant to be at this time.”

Lemay has experienced this phenomenon for a number of years. Usually, the dreams start about five years before this feeling. For example, in 2018, he dreamt of a glasswasher, where the items spun around inside the machine. At the time, he worked at a restaurant with the standard industrial dishwasher (square-shaped, drive-through), and he wouldn’t see the other machine in real life until 2023. 

Besides that, the topic of dreams came up during Lemay’s poetry class’ discussion about ancestors, a theme that ran throughout the semester. He wondered about the possibilities of a multiverse with different realities. Instead of the given psychological explanation of déjà vu, it could be a break in the dream realms.

“Dreams and déjà vu hand in hand may not be just of our past experiences, past selves, but also our ancestors’,” he said, “and, in this way, [they] could really also be in the future.”

I’ve had certain moments, especially when I’m watching new YouTube videos, where I think, “Hang on, I feel like I’ve seen/experienced this before.” More directly connected to Lemay’s theory, I remember distinctly thinking one winter, “What if my awake state is just a dream and I’ll wake up from it eventually?”

Lemay has discussed this theory with a few people, none of whom have experienced it. Since the dreams are infrequent, he lets them come without trying to influence or change them, finding joy and gratitude when they do arrive. 

As for journaling, Lemay hasn’t tried it yet, since writing dreams down isn’t his first instinct. “I like to dwell on [it] in that half-awakened state until I’m fully awake, and then it’s gone,” he explained. “After I wake up from a dream that I don’t remember, I do definitely remember how it made me feel, if not what actually happened.”

However, Lemay uses dreams to combat writer’s block. If he’s puzzling out a story’s plot or themes, he goes to bed thinking about what’s currently planned and written and where he wants or thinks it will go, while still being open-minded. Sometimes he remembers the dream upon waking up, but other times he doesn’t and the solution comes to him when he writes.

Lemay said,

“I believe that what you do, what you think, what you say will change your future. It’s setting intentions and using dreams as a vessel for that.”

He has recommended this technique to another classmate, who said it worked for them. “Just make sure you’re not writing something too scary,” Lemay warned. 

Despite everything, he doesn’t try to put too much stock into these theories, preferring to observe them with interest in the same way he treats astrology signs.

“It’s something that adds to my life but doesn’t necessarily set the course or impact it in a greater way that I know,” he said. “It feels like something small and harmless [where] I can have a delightful moment in my day between the asleep and awakened state and trying to make sense of it all.”

To be honest, this was the strangest feature I’ve written for The Navigator. The topic was so abstract that I had no good question to close the interviews. Then again, that’s the nature of dreams and dreaming itself.

As I mentioned earlier, my dreams have happened less frequently and either disappear from my memory when I wake up or are more mundane. Sometimes they’re memorable due to family members, classmates, or celebrities such as Stray Kids randomly appearing. Other times, they’re so unpleasant I have no choice but to wake up (anything involving wasps, for example). 

But when it came to these interviews, I was truly blown away by the strange twists the conversations took. Both Taylor’s and Wohlleben’s dreams were fascinating, and Lemay’s metaphysical explorations gave me pause. They’re something to keep in the back of the mind and an eye out for in the future. (And to include in future stories.) 

But you don’t have to be a Creative Writing student, or even a writer, to get in on the action. Everyone reading this piece right now should pay closer attention to their dreams and any unusual occurrences in their daily life they’d otherwise dismiss as “coincidences.” 

If you’re having trouble sleeping, consider modifying your bedtime routines. Try to maintain a sleep schedule. Turn off electronic devices and instead read or listen to a relaxing podcast. 

Avoid caffeine and heavy foods before bed. If you need to, take melatonin or another supplement. For more recommendations, check out Healthline’s sleeping tips.

Finally, try journaling your dreams or using them to help with creative writing, like Lemay does. Send us your dreams: scary, weird, your versions of the toilet dream, whatever your mind comes up with. 

After all, life is but a dream. (Or is it?)