Literary dream · Cities & buildings
The child on my back grew heavy as stone
Tokyo, Japan · 1908
六つになる子供を負ってる。たしかに自分の子である。ただ不思議な事にはいつの間にか眼が潰れて、青坊主になっている。……おれは人殺であったんだなと始めて気がついた途端に、背中の子が急に石地蔵のように重くなった。
I am carrying a six-year-old child on my back. It is certainly my own child. The strange thing is that at some point its eyes have gone blind and its head is shaven… The moment I first realised that I had been a murderer, the child on my back suddenly grew heavy as a stone Jizō.
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- Source
- Ten Nights of Dreams, First Night — Natsume Sōseki, 1908
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- Tokyo, Japan · Japanese
- Date
- 1908
- Uncertainty
- Moderate — Literary dream sequence; each night is a short story told as a dream.
- Imagery
- Child · Road · Darkness · Forest
- Feelings
- Unease · Horror
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
- Back in the little town of his birth Russia · 1866 (novel)
- A mother praying for a father who never returns Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- Irma’s injection Bellevue, near Vienna · 23–24 July 1895
- Would the fall never come to an end? Oxford, England · 1865 (novel)
- Three horses at one trough Luoyang (setting) · novel (printed 1522); set 220
- Cooking rice in a stone mortar Jianghuai region, China · c. 800 (Tang)