Literary dream · People & kin
A mother praying for a father who never returns
Tokyo, Japan · 1908
家には若い母と三つになる子供がいる。父はどこかへ行った。父がどこかへ行ったのは、月の出ていない夜中であった。
In the house are a young mother and a three-year-old child. The father has gone somewhere. He went away in the middle of a moonless night.
Open this dream in the galaxy →
- Source
- Ten Nights of Dreams, First Night — Natsume Sōseki, 1908
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- Tokyo, Japan · Japanese
- Date
- 1908
- Uncertainty
- Moderate — The dream turns out to be a story the dreamer once heard from his mother.
- Imagery
- Mother · Father · Child · Darkness · War · Temple
- Feelings
- Longing · Grief · Unease
How traditions have read this kind of dream
Psychological
Family members, friends and strangers populate most dreams. Freud read many such dreams as wishes in disguise; contemporary researchers emphasise continuity with waking relationships and concerns.
Freud, Dream Psychology (1920)
Mythological
Dreams in epic and scripture are often addressed to someone — a wife waiting for a husband, a son receiving a vision for his family — and are told aloud to be understood.
Odyssey XIX; Genesis 37
Chinese traditions
Confucius lamented that he no longer dreamed of the Duke of Zhou; in Chinese letters, dreaming of someone is a measure of how much they are on one’s mind.
Analects 7.5
These are cultural lenses, not a diagnosis.
Dreams that share its images
- Dreaming of my late wife at her window Mizhou (Zhucheng, Shandong), China · 20th day of the 1st lunar month, 1075
- The moon, then the sun, entered my bosom Wu (Zhejiang), China · c. 175–182
- Woken from a dream a thousand li long Southern Song China · c. 1138
- A thunderbolt fell on my father’s house Mesopotamia · 401 BCE
- The white horse at dawn Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- My son would be killed by an iron spear Sardis, Lydia · c. 550 BCE (as told)