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Jul 25, 2014 By Orenda Fink Orenda Fink

Nocturnal Admittance is our series where an artist writes about their most vivid recurring dream or nightmare. For this Nocturnal Admittance, Orenda Fink writes about a nightmarish experience in India that has inspired a recurring nightmare. The former Azure Ray singer is releasing her fittingly titled new solo album, Blue Dream, on August 19 via Saddle Creek.

I dream. A lot. And my dreams are usually pretty extreme, ranging from terrifying to euphoric. They are sometimes even mystical-leaning with spontaneous Vodou fire and gap tooth priestesses translating messages from the Spirit world. It gets pretty crazy in there (my head). But, in the last couple of years I’ve been studying my nightly journeys intensely with a Jungian dream analyst and learning some fascinating things about the language of dreams. One of them is Jung’s theory about repeating dreams. He believes that if a dream is trying to send you an important message and you don’t get it, the dream will just come to you again and again until you understand it—a recurring dream. Which is why the recurring dream I’ve had for the last 10 years is so funny and intriguing to me because it’s about, well, bathrooms.

I feel I have to begin with a story that took place in Calcutta in 2002. I was at a train station with my friend Chris Lawson who had traveled through India many times. We had come a long way that morning to get to the station and I needed to pee very badly. Chris warned me, “I would hold it if I were you. These bathrooms are quite possibly the worst in the world.” Now, I had already been a touring musician for several years at this point so it was hard to scare me with a story of a bad bathroom. And I really needed to go. As in, I literally couldn’t hold it anymore. So, against his advice I headed to the women’s room. I walked up to a stall with a heavy wooden door and surveyed the situation. There was an inch of urine to wade through in order to reach the Eastern style toilet (and if you don’t know what that is, it’s a hole in the floor). I hesitated for a moment as I was wearing sandals and a long skirt, but the intense need to urinate drove me forward. I walked into the stall and closed the door and realized that with the door closed the space was entirely pitch black darkness. I could not see my hand in front of my face. So, I opened the door back up, took good inventory of the space, shut it and attempted to blindly negotiate my way to the toilet. I managed to straddle the hole successfully, hike up my skirt and was just about to have the sweet relief that had driven me to such extremes, when all of the sudden I feel several large furry creatures begin to pelt at my calves. I leap out of the stall, bursting dramatically out of the door and turn to see four of the biggest rats I have ever seen bouncing around like demented popcorn off the walls. Where did they come from? Did they think I was food? Why did they attack my bare legs? Out of breath, I run back to Chris. I’m covered in other people’s urine, horrified by the rat attack, and perhaps the most traumatic of all—I never even got to use the bathroom. And if you can believe it, that day just got worse from there.

A few years after that I started having dreams about bathrooms. Horrible bathrooms, impossible bathrooms, filthy bathrooms, dangerous bathrooms. And in every dream the need to urinate is so powerful that I will attempt to systematically work through every obstacle to get to the toilet. I have attempted to mount a toilet suspended in air from chains only to find it covered in urine and feces. I have attempted to use bathrooms swarming with bees, protected by leopards, ones with men’s faces peering up from holes in the floor, even one in a mobile home that began sliding down a mountainside with my mother inside. Do I ever actually get to use the bathroom in the dreams? No. I always wake right before I finally get the chance. But they are not dreams about having to go to the bathroom—most of the time when I wake up I don’t need to go.

Even my therapist is stumped about these dreams, but they come with such frequency that I feel I have to figure out what the message is. Am I trying to “purge” something from myself that my psyche won’t allow? Am I placing obstacles in the way of something I must do for myself—something natural and necessary that I am obstructing? I only recently put the story in Calcutta together with the dreams. Was that experience so traumatic that it created a personal archetype to teach me something about myself? That is my best guess for now and is maybe the key for ultimately understanding the dream’s message. And I hope I get it soon because I’d like to walk into a bathroom for once and not feel like… I’m in a bad dream.