Excerpt from a dream I had early this morning. There was a lot of other stuff going on in this dream but this is what’s stayed with me.

I was at a friend’s place, and went to the bathroom to pee. I started the job, only to find that my feet were getting wet. I was barefoot.

I looked down to find that urine was running out of the toilet bowl through a horizontal slit in the foot of the toilet, right where it met the floor. The toilet itself was empty, and just let the pee drain out onto the floor tiles. And the pisser’s feet.

I was scandalised by this, but apparently the toilet was a replica of a special model they had recently uncovered that had been used somewhere in the world in the 15th Century. So it was totally trendy for my friend to have one. I mean, given that the domestic toilet as we know it really only came about in the 18th Century (although there were examples of water-using toilets from thousands of years before that, and this 15th Century model didn’t actually seem to use water, except possibly to further flood one’s bathroom floor), I suppose the … shape of the seat … was pretty revolutionary?

I learned more about it in an article online – an article with the haunting headline that I have used for this blog post. Or at least I was learning about it, when my alarm clock went off and I woke up.