Shit, Sex, and the Kraken: What My Dreams Taught Me About Self-Empathy

I was trying to hide a dirty diaper and there was shit everywhere.

That’s what the dream showed me. And I had no idea what to do with it.

Or this one: I was in a public bathroom and every stall was filthy, unusable, overflowing.

Or: I was sick, and there was just… too much shit. Everywhere.

And that’s not even touching the sex dreams.

You know the ones. The dreams where you’re with someone—or something—you definitely shouldn’t be with, doing things that make you wake up mortified.

For about a year, I kept having dreams like this. Dreams I refused to write down.

And for a year, I stayed half-accessible to myself. One-sided. Living out of balance because I was refusing to look at what the other half was trying to show me.

Because dreams don’t care if you’re ready to look at them. They just keep showing up.

 

Years ago, during spiritual formation, I picked up Robert Johnson’s Inner Work. I read it, worked with one of my dreams, and made a SoulCollage piece that still hangs in my office.

That moment cracked something open.

I realized: the unconscious isn’t just background noise. It’s the other half of your personality. And if you’re not accessing it—if you’re cutting yourself off from what your psyche is trying to show you—your ego stays one-sided. Incomplete.

You end up walking through life with half of yourself in the dark.

So I started training. I work in the classical Jungian tradition—the archetypal framework, the collective unconscious, the big patterns. But I lean heavily on Hillman because he kept pushing back against the thing I most wanted to do: flatten the dream into something tidy. Make it mean one thing. Get the answer and move on.

Hillman said: stay with the image. Don’t rush past the strangeness.

That’s what I needed to hear.

But knowing you need to do this work and actually doing it are two very different things.

Especially when the dreams are embarrassing.

 

Shit. In every form you can imagine.

Trying to hide dirty diapers. Overflowing toilets. Being sick with too much of it. Public bathrooms covered in it. Just… shit, showing up over and over in different scenarios but always with the same underlying image.

For maybe a year, I resisted.

Because who wants to sit with that? Who wants to write in their journal about literal feces? Who wants to bring that to a dream circle and say, “So… I keep dreaming about shit”?

But here’s what finally shifted: I realized that symbols in dreams don’t carry the same definition they do in waking reality.

Shit in a dream isn’t about shit.

Sex in a dream isn’t about sex.

The unconscious doesn’t speak literally. It speaks symbolically.

And once I understood that—really understood it—I felt this enormous sense of relief.

I could finally engage with the material without the shame.

 

I write my dreams down. Always. Even when I don’t want to.

Sometimes I draw them, especially when words can’t capture what I’m seeing.

I had this dream once about a dragon-snake-sea-monster. I couldn’t explain it in language—it was too big, too strange, too mythic. So I drew it.  

 

This massive, terrifying, beautiful creature rising out of dark water.

And then I realized: I wanted to have sex with it.

I woke up thinking, Dear Lord, Jennifer.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t dismiss it. I stayed with it.

I carried that image with me through the day. I noticed when something in my waking life triggered the memory of it. And over time, I started to understand what it was showing me.

That Kraken—as scary as it was—became a source of comfort. When I needed to self-mother, when I needed something strong and primal to hold me, I’d think of it.

I know how that sounds. But that’s how dream work actually goes. The images don’t make sense until they do. And sometimes the thing you thought was terrifying becomes the thing that holds you.

 

That’s the practice: staying with the image until it starts to show you what it knows.

So when I went back to those shit dreams—the ones I’d been avoiding for a year—I stopped trying to make them mean something.

I just sat with them.

I noticed the feeling tone. The mood when I woke up. The mortification. The sense that I was dealing with something I didn’t have the capacity for.

And slowly, I started to see it.

I was trying to process grief in contexts that didn’t have space for it. I was dealing with deep psychological material in containers that couldn’t hold the weight of what I was carrying. And I was mortified that anyone might see the mess.

As I started addressing those patterns in my waking life—finding bigger containers, creating more spacious contexts for what I was processing—the dreams shifted.

They didn’t disappear. But they changed. Slowed down. Became less frantic.

Because my dream reality and my waking reality were finally in conversation with each other.

That’s the work. Keeping that dialogue going between the conscious mind (what you know, what you’re aware of, what you can control) and the unconscious (everything else—the hidden patterns, the unprocessed material, the parts of yourself you haven’t met yet).

When that conversation breaks down, you end up living out of balance. One-sided.

And here’s what I didn’t realize at the beginning: dream work wasn’t just about insight. It was about relationship.

I didn’t know that working with my dreams would deepen my relationship to myself. That it would teach me how to be tender and nurturing to me. That it would become a radical practice of self-empathy.

There was a fundamental shift in how I relate to my inner work. Dream work helped me build a tolerance for ambiguity and imperfection. For not having the answer. For letting things be strange and unresolved.

And seeing others share their weird, embarrassing dreams helped me connect more deeply to the shared human experience. We’re all walking around with this bizarre nocturnal material. We’re all trying to make sense of it.

We’re not alone in this.

But I also need to be honest about something: this work isn’t easy.

Dream work requires discipline. Some mornings I wake up and can’t muster the energy to write down even a single image. The well runs dry. Motivation disappears. And that’s part of the practice too—the ebb and flow.

And even when you’re motivated, the work is uncomfortable.

You have to sit with bizarre, embarrassing, sometimes horrifying imagery. You have to translate a foreign language. You have to let go of what you want the dream to mean and let it show you what it’s actually saying.

But here’s the other truth: some dreams I can’t see clearly on my own.

I’m too close. Too defended. Too attached to the story I’m telling myself.

I had a dream where I was the bride and the wedding was starting at 5 PM. At 4:45, I realized I hadn’t done my makeup yet. I asked my sister to help me, but something kept preventing her.

When I shared that dream in circle, I thought it was about time pressure. About not being prepared. About my sister not showing up for me.

But someone in the group asked: “Has some part of your capacity for self-presentation—for knowing how to adorn and prepare yourself for threshold moments—been living in her rather than fully integrated in you?”

And something cracked open.

I couldn’t see that on my own. I was too inside the story of what I thought the dream was about.

But witnessing—someone else reflecting back what they saw in the image—revealed a layer I couldn’t access alone.

That’s why circles matter.

We are co-dreamers in each other’s becoming. And sometimes the only way to befriend your dreams is to let someone else see them with you.

If your psyche has been knocking—if there are dreams that won’t leave you alone, images that keep showing up, symbols you’ve been avoiding—this is your container.

And if you’re not ready—if this feels like too much right now—I get it.

But maybe start writing your dreams down. Even the embarrassing ones. Even the ones you don’t want to look at.

Carry them with you through the day. Notice when something triggers their memory.

Because your unconscious is trying to show you something.

And it’s not going to stop until you start listening.