Dream Galaxy

Literary dream · Cities & buildings

A procession coming down the hill

Yamato Province, Japan · 1904 (retold folk tale)

He thought that as he was lying there in his garden, he saw a procession, like the train of some great daimyō descending a hill near by, and that he got up to look at it. A very grand procession it proved to be… and it was advancing toward his dwelling.

Original text — Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things — The Dream of Akinosuké, Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo)

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Source
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things — The Dream of Akinosuké — Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo), 1904. The Dream of Akinosuké
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Literary dream
Place
Yamato Province, Japan · Japanese
Date
1904 (retold folk tale)
Uncertainty
High — Hearn's English retelling of a Japanese tale; in it, the dream kingdom turns out to be an ants' nest — a story kin to the Chinese tale of Nanke.
Imagery
Garden · Crowd · Palace · Insects · Ruler
Feelings
Wonder

How traditions have read this kind of dream

Psychological

Houses, corridors and endless stairs are frequent dream settings. Some writers read buildings as figures for the self; others note simply that dreams rebuild the spaces we move through every day.

cf. Stevenson, A Chapter on Dreams (1888)

Mythological

Labyrinths, towers and underground cities appear in myths from Crete to Babel — built places where people lose their way, reach too high, or find hidden kingdoms.

Greek myth; Genesis 11

Chinese traditions

Tang tales like “The Governor of Nanke” place a whole kingdom of palaces inside a dream, only to reveal it as an ants’ nest — a lasting image for the brevity of worldly glory.

Li Gongzuo, c. 802

These are cultural lenses, not a diagnosis.

Dreams that share its images