Digest Your Life

The unlikely gift of my recurring dreams about toilets.

Jul 17, 2026

I’ve been thinking about digestion a lot recently. More accurately, I’ve been dreaming about it. For months now, my dreams have mostly been about stomachs, bowels, and toilets. These are not the nicest dreams, as you can imagine, and so of course I’ve wondered what on earth they mean. While it’s been tempting to ask a search engine to interpret these dreams for me, I’ve resisted and worked with them through association instead. What they seem to be offering me is less a gentle invitation and more a firm command: Digest your life.

In some ways, this doesn’t feel new. I am highly sensitive - possibly neurodivergent - and I appear to absorb more sensory and emotional information than most people. Depending on the day, this can feel like a blessing or a curse. I get overwhelmed easily and it can take me days or even weeks to recover from situations that others seem to bounce back from in a matter of minutes. This used to be a source of shame, but now I see it simply as a facet of how I am made. I can’t change how I experience the world, but I can work on finding ways to metabolise that experience. Mostly that means seeking a process that will help me manage the feelings of oversaturation and enable me to absorb what’s needed and nourishing while allowing what is not to pass through. In other words, a process of inner digestion.

Art by Sonya Hallett https://thescrappapertiger.wordpress.com/2016/05/21/weird/

Looking back, I can see all the ways I have tried, and struggled, to do this inner digesting: the diaries half-filled with scribbled entries, the situations endlessly rehearsed or replayed in my head, the long walks, the (often accidental) napping, and the faces of kind people who have listened to me without judgement - friends, therapists, spiritual directors.

All of these things have helped, and I am grateful for them. Yet, the dreams keep coming, and with them, the insistent command: Digest your life. It makes me wonder what I’m not understanding. It makes me want to ask, How?

Like most questions that surface through dreamwork or deep inner reflection, I suspect it’s a question meant to be lived rather than answered. I don’t need to step out of my life to find the solution before I can continue. It’s enough to put the question in my pocket and take it with me, turning it over in my hand as I go. As I do that, I notice that I’m less concerned about finding an answer and more comfortable with needing to ask the question in the first place. Even though I’ve long been on this journey towards acceptance of my sensitivity (and the associated tendency to feel overwhelmed), lurking along the path are Embarrassment and her evil stepsister, Shame. Together they yell at me “What’s wrong with you?! Why are you like this?!” Staying committed to living the question “How can I digest my life?” seems to help me to avoid spiralling into despair.

Slowly, I’m realising that it’s okay to need to digest my life; the command isn’t a criticism it’s simply a statement of fact. Much like the physical process of digestion, my need for a process that will enable me to absorb the nutrients of life and expel the rest isn’t a sign that anything is wrong, but a sign that I am alive and receptive to all that life is offering. Some of it is needed, some of it is not. It’s natural and good to allow the process of absorbing and expelling. It’s healthy to need to digest.

I suppose in a way I’m learning to get more comfortable practising what I preach through my work. As a spiritual director, I regularly invite people to sit with something they have said or noticed or felt that seems to be especially true or significant. The intention is to let their inner experience settle so that whatever is life-giving or important can be absorbed and whatever is not needed can pass through and be released. In spiritual direction, this mostly looks like two people sitting together in the sanctuary of quiet and being open to whatever seems to want to happen.

These moments don’t always yield dramatic results but they always feel sacred. There’s a profound surrender in simply sitting with the unfiltered reality of our lives, open to the possibility that something important might want to happen even without us needing to know everything about it in advance. Where we really are is where God is too and when someone is willing to stay with - or digest - the truth of where they are, they pass through the doorway of their life into encounter with the Divine. What happens next is never predictable but often people find that these times of soulful digestion are the ones which seem to allow something to clarify or release or shift.

If I were really to follow my own advice I suppose I’d be wise to respond to my dream invitation by introducing more periods of quiet sitting. And I do think allowing open time and quiet space is important, a way of resisting the temptation to respond to overwhelm with just “one more thing” (the equivalent of Christmas Day evening when I convince myself that the tonic for my fullness is a sliver of Christmas cake or a morsel of cheese). But sitting quietly doesn’t always seem sufficient to enable the digestion. My overwhelm usually comes with a restless energy and to sit down quietly - especially alone - feels hard if not impossible.

I felt the full reality of this a few days ago when, having spent the weekend with Henry in beautiful but sweltering Paris, I woke up feeling utterly overwhelmed. It was wonderful, but also exhausting. I loved my time with Henry, but navigating through crowds in 37 degree heat is not for the faint-hearted or the highly sensitive. I felt frustrated and overstimulated. After a day or so I remembered the dream command. I realised I needed to stop ruminating over what had gone wrong and instead accept that it had simply been a lot: digestion was needed. I could have journaled, slept, gone on a long walk or simply sat quietly but I decided my restless hands wanted to make something.

I gathered all the snippets of our trip, dug out my watercolours and my beloved mini photo printer, and decided to make a scrapbook. As I scrolled through the photos and mixed up my paints, I felt the emotional and sensory load begin to shift. The quiet rhythm of matching words to images became a way of filtering the noise and absorbing the joy.

Three hours later, I emerged feeling lighter. In taking time to look at the photos I’d taken, paint the scenes that had inspired me, and write down all the things we did, I’d given myself the opportunity to digest. In doing so I’d absorbed the sacred gift of the trip. And while I’m delighted to have a keepsake filled with the nourishment of the weekend, the real miracle is that the waste now seems to have worked its way through.

That night, for the first time in ages, I didn’t dream of bowels or toilets.

Perhaps I’m finally getting the message.