DREAM GALAXY

Literary dream · Nature & weather

Two red lotuses that would fade

Tāmralipti, Bengal · c. 1070 (compiled)

then Siva was pleased to appear to that couple in a dream; and giving them two red lotuses the god said to them,—“take each, of you one of these lotuses in your hand. And if either of you shall be unfaithful during your separation, the lotus in the hand of the other shall fade, but not otherwise.” After hearing this, the two woke up, and each beheld in the hand of the other a red lotus

Original text — The Kathá Sarit Ságara, or Ocean of the Streams of Story (Tawney trans.), Somadeva; trans. C. H. Tawney

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Source
The Kathá Sarit Ságara, or Ocean of the Streams of Story (Tawney trans.) — Somadeva; trans. C. H. Tawney, c. 1070 / 1880–84 (trans.). Ch. XIII
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Literary dream
Place
Tāmralipti, Bengal · Indian
Date
c. 1070 (compiled)
Uncertainty
High — From the Kathāsaritsāgara, Somadeva’s 11th-century Sanskrit story collection (C. H. Tawney trans., 1880–84); a story-dream, not a personal report.
Imagery
Flower · Partner · Temple
Feelings
Tenderness · Longing

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

Flower

What flower was it? Did someone give it to you, plant it, or did it simply appear? Was it opening or fading?

Jung · The golden flower

Jung wrote a commentary on the Chinese inner-alchemy text The Secret of the Golden Flower, reading its flower as an image of a centre. It is his reading of a Daoist text through his own framework, not the text’s own meaning.

C. G. Jung, “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower”, Collected Works 13

Chinese drama Literature

In The Peony Pavilion, Du Liniang falls asleep after walking in a spring garden and dreams of a young scholar among the flowers; the dream love outlasts her waking life.

Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion (1598), “The Interrupted Dream”

English Romantic poetry Literature

Coleridge asked what it would mean to pass through Paradise in a dream, be given a flower as a pledge, and wake with the flower in your hand.

S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae (1895)

All perspectives on flower →

Partner

Was it your partner now, someone from the past, or someone you have never met? Was the distance between you the same as when you are awake?

Jung · Anima and animus — after the real person

Jung would first read a dreamed partner as your actual partner and relationship. Only then might the figure carry what he called the anima or animus — an inner image of the other — a framing that reflects his era’s ideas about gender.

C. G. Jung, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, “Anima and Animus””, Collected Works 7

Homeric epic Classical text

After twenty years apart, Penelope tells how a likeness of Odysseus lay beside her that night, “such as he was when he went with the host”, and how she took it for real.

Homer, Odyssey XX

Han-dynasty poetry Literature

In one of the Nineteen Old Poems, a wife sleeping alone through the long nights dreams she sees her husband’s face, and he comes for her in a carriage — then is gone.

Nineteen Old Poems, “Cold, cold, the year draws to its end”

All perspectives on partner →

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Dreams that share its images