The Toad at the Threshold

Photo by Laura Seaman on Unsplash

The Toad at the Threshold

Some years ago, when I was about to embark on a new pilot workshop, I dreamed of meeting a toad in a desert.

At the time, I would not have said I was especially worried. I was excited about the project and busy getting on with it. Looking back, though, I think the dream knew something I did not. Beneath my conscious enthusiasm, there was anxiety about stepping into unfamiliar territory, putting myself forward and not knowing quite what I might encounter.

It was only a snatch of a dream, but I remember the toad, the oddness of the setting and the moment when I opened my mouth to speak—and swallowed it.

I woke feeling sick.

The image stayed with me, partly because it was so peculiar. Toads belong in damp earth, ditches, ponds and shadowy gardens. They do not belong in deserts. Yet there it was, in a landscape where there seemed to be no place for it to live. And instead of speaking, I took it into my body.

Dreams often present us with images that resist immediate or tidy explanation. Perhaps that is part of their power. A toad in a desert is not an obvious symbol, and swallowing one is even less so.

I was about to begin something that would require me to speak, act and put myself forward. Yet in the dream, at the very moment I opened my mouth, I could not speak. My mouth became the place where I swallowed something earthy, repellent and difficult to digest.

Perhaps the worry I had not consciously acknowledged had found its own image. One thing I was conscious of was that I had not run a workshop for some time due to lockdown, so I had aged and also gained weight (vanity, vanity...).

The Unlovely Creature

In fairy tales, the toad is rarely invited to the feast.

It does not have the beauty of the swan, the freedom of the bird or the nobility of the horse. It sits low to the ground, squat and watchful, close to mud, water and shadow.

Its rough skin and ungainly appearance have long been linked to what is ugly, secretive, or faintly sinister. In stories, it may appear beside a witch, near a dark pool or in some neglected corner where respectable people would rather not look.

Fairy tales, however, tend to know better than to dismiss the unlovely.

Again and again, they ask us to approach the creature we would prefer to avoid. The despised animal may be enchanted. The toad can become a prince. The beggar may be a king. The ugly old woman may carry wisdom. Something that appears lowly, repellent or insignificant may be hiding something of real value.

The toad belongs to this company.

A Creature Out of Place

Like all amphibians, the toad lives between water and land.

Water is often associated with feeling, memory, dreams and the unconscious. Earth belongs to the body, to ordinary life, and to material reality. The toad moves between the two, carrying something of the watery depths into the solid world.

It is a creature of thresholds.

But the toad in my dream had been displaced from both water and damp earth. It appeared in a desert: a place of dryness, exposure and little shelter.

The desert may represent emptiness, deprivation or isolation, but it can also be a place of testing and revelation. In myths and sacred stories, people enter the desert when familiar distractions have fallen away. There is nowhere to hide and very little to sustain the old way of being.

The new workshop topic was taking me into similarly unfamiliar territory. Consciously, I felt ready for it. The desert may have represented the less confident part of me: the part that felt exposed, unsupported and unsure whether I had what I needed to survive there.

And in the middle of that arid landscape was a creature associated with moisture, instinct and the hidden life of the earth.

Something living had appeared where it did not seem able to survive.

Swallowing the Toad

To swallow something is to take it inside.

We speak of swallowing our pride, swallowing an insult or swallowing words we cannot bring ourselves to say. We swallow what is difficult, disagreeable or indigestible.

In the dream, I opened my mouth to speak, but the toad entered instead.

Perhaps this reflected an anxiety about finding my voice. New projects often require us to make something inward visible. We have to speak with authority before we feel particularly authoritative, claim space before we are certain we deserve it, and risk being seen without knowing how others will respond.

The toad may have carried something I had not yet admitted to myself: fear, doubt, ambition, awkwardness or some less polished part of me that did not fit the confident face I was presenting to the world.

The dream did not allow me to leave it outside.

I had to take it in.

That does not necessarily mean that swallowing the toad was a positive act. The nausea mattered. My body registered revulsion. Something about the image was too much, too close or too difficult to digest.

Dreams may show us what we are doing rather than what we ought to do. Perhaps I was swallowing fears that needed to be spoken. Perhaps I was taking in other people’s expectations or doubts. Perhaps I believed I had to absorb something distasteful in order to proceed.

Or perhaps the toad represented an instinctive wisdom I did not yet know how to welcome in any other way.

A dream does not offer a single answer, and I am glad of that. It forces reflection, a sitting-with, until its meaning appears.

What We Would Rather Reject

The toad may symbolise a part of ourselves we have judged unacceptable.

It may be something bodily, needy, envious, angry or ashamed. It may be a feeling we think we ought to have outgrown, or a desire that does not fit with the person we prefer to believe ourselves to be.

We may try to push such parts down into the mud, but rejected parts do not simply disappear. Sometimes they return in dreams, where they are harder to ignore.

In therapy, the part that first appears most troublesome is often guarding something more vulnerable. Irritability may protect hurt. Withdrawal may protect fear. Grandiosity may conceal shame. What looks unpleasant on the surface may have developed for a reason.

The fairy tale does not ask us to admire the toad. It asks us not to assume that its appearance tells us everything.

What have I called ugly before finding out what it carries?

And what happens when the rejected thing can no longer be kept at a safe distance?

Medicine and Poison

The toad has also long been associated with poison.

Some toads produce substances that protect them from predators, which no doubt contributed to their darker reputation in folklore. Symbolically, however, poison and medicine are often close relations. What harms in one dose may heal in another. What we fear may also contain information we need.

Psychologically, the poison might be bitterness, envy, resentment or rage. Left unexamined, such feelings can seep into our lives and relationships. We may project them onto other people, convinced that the ugliness belongs entirely to them.

Once recognised, however, those same feelings may tell us something important.

Bitterness may point to something that has never been forgiven. Envy may show us a life we have not dared to claim. Rage may tell us that a boundary has been crossed. Fear may warn us that the ground beneath us is not yet secure.

The feeling is not the whole message, but it should not be dismissed either.

The toad does not offer sweetness. It offers a more difficult medicine: the possibility that what we most dislike may still have something to teach us.

Close to the Ground

The toad’s world is earthy.

It does not soar above life. It stays close to soil, roots, insects and fallen leaves. It belongs to the physical, the primitive, and the real.

This earthiness can be corrective when we have become too identified with ideals, spiritual aspirations or our own cleverness. The toad brings us back to the body and to the awkward facts of existence.

We hunger. We age. Our looks fade. We become jealous. We need other people. We make mistakes. We are not always generous, wise or composed.

The toad is unlikely to be impressed by our persona.

Perhaps this was part of the dream’s impact. I was preparing to begin a project that would involve thought, language and presentation. I was concentrating on what I would say and how I would appear. Yet the dream gave me something bodily and wordless.

Before I could speak, I encountered the rough, instinctive creature beneath the polished idea.

And I could not simply talk my way around it.

The Treasure in the Unlovely

Fairy tales often hide treasure in unlikely places.

The precious object may be inside a beast, beneath the earth, at the bottom of a well or in the keeping of a creature nobody respects. The treasure cannot be found by remaining in the bright and orderly parts of the kingdom.

The hero or heroine has to enter the forest, approach what frightens or disgusts them, and learn to see differently.

The toad may guard the treasure of instinct: knowing when to remain still, when to retreat and when to leap. It may represent the ability to survive difficult conditions and to wait through long periods of darkness.

A toad does not require the world to be beautiful before it carries on living.

Perhaps the toad in the desert represented a part of me that could survive the uncertainty of beginning. It was not graceful or reassuring, but it was alive.

Something instinctive had made its way into a barren landscape.

Before the Transformation

We are often in too much of a hurry to get to the transformation.

We want the beast to become a prince, the ashes to reveal the treasure and the dark forest to give way to a clear road home.

But the toad may ask us to pause before the magical change.

What if the point is not simply to turn the toad into something more attractive? What if the toad itself has value?

This is one of the dangers of interpreting symbols too quickly. We may try to tidy them up, make them positive or rush towards some supposedly higher meaning. In doing so, we risk overlooking the image that has actually appeared.

Sometimes the psyche does not give us a swan on a lake.

Sometimes it gives us a toad in a desert.

And sometimes, just as we open our mouths to speak, we swallow it.

The task may be to remain with the roughness of the image and the sickness it provoked. To wonder what has been taken in, what remains undigested and what words may have been displaced.

Looking back, I think the dream revealed an anxiety that had not yet reached my conscious mind. Outwardly, I was ready to begin. Somewhere beneath that confidence, however, I knew I was entering unfamiliar ground. The dream gave that feeling a landscape, a creature and a physical sensation I could not easily ignore.

It did not tell me whether the project would succeed. It brought me face to face with the part of beginning that was awkward, instinctive and hard to swallow.

The toad appeared at the threshold.

And before I could go any further, I had to integrate it.