Dream Dictionary

A short read on the legends and strange tales around this reading, with this site's own view.

People of the past did not simply cower after a bad dream. From around the Edo period, the custom of placing a picture of the baku, a mythical beast from China, under one's pillow is said to have spread in Japan. Described with an elephant's trunk, a rhinoceros's eyes, an ox's tail and a tiger's paws, the baku was believed to eat nightmares, and at New Year people slept on pictures of a treasure ship bearing the character for baku on its sail to protect their first dream of the year. There are also traditions of saying "let the baku eat it" after a bad dream, or setting a picture of the baku adrift on a river.

Prayers to "turn aside" dreams go back even further. A Hakuhō-period Kannon statue kept at Hōryū-ji in Nara has long been called Yumechigai Kannon, the dream-changing Kannon, from the belief that it turns bad dreams into good ones. In folk practice, too, there are traditions such as telling a bad dream to a nandina bush so that it "turns misfortune around," along with charm-songs for sealing dreams away, and some research suggests these descended from court rituals of onmyōdō into village life.

As we see it here, what these practices share is that they do not leave the nightmare sitting inside you. Feed it to the baku, tell it to a tree, set it on the river. This is our own conjecture, but to people who believed dreams foretold the future, a nightmare was a seed that would come true if left alone, and only by pushing it outside and letting something else take it on could they face the next night in peace. Looking up a dream's meaning may be a small, modern version of the same rite: putting the unease left in your chest into words and sending it out.