Anecdote collection · Animals
Four people in black asked to live
Runan, China · 4th century (Jin)
大兒夢四烏衣人請命。覺，忽見鴨將殺，遂救之，買肉以代。還夢四人來謝而去。
His eldest son dreamed of four people in black asking for their lives. On waking he saw the ducks about to be killed, saved them and bought meat instead. He dreamed again that the four came to thank him and left.
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- Source
- Taiping Guangji, dream volumes 276–282 — Li Fang et al. (compilers), 978
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Runan, China · Chinese
- Date
- 4th century (Jin)
- Uncertainty
- High — Anecdote preserved in the Taiping Guangji (978); the dream is reported, not first-hand.
- Imagery
- Bird · Animals · Crowd
- Feelings
- Tenderness · Relief
How traditions have read this kind of dream
Psychological
Animals in dreams often speak, change form or carry strong feeling. Ellis suggested such dreams may lie behind fables of talking animals; later writers read them as instinct given a face.
Ellis (1911), note 262
Mythological
Messenger animals are everywhere in myth: the eagle in Penelope’s dream, Pharaoh’s seven cows, guardian dogs at the gates of the dead.
Odyssey XIX; Genesis 41
Chinese traditions
In the Liezi’s “deer under banana leaves”, a hunted deer becomes a puzzle about where dreaming ends; Zhuangzi’s butterfly turns the question inside out.
Liezi; Zhuangzi
These are cultural lenses, not a diagnosis.
Dreams that share its images
- Ten men in black begging for their lives Jinyang, China · 4th century (Jin)
- An orchestra of birdsong England · before 1911
- Pigs on the edge of a cliff Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- A snake became an eagle and carried me off Asia Minor · c. 470 BCE
- The eagle and the twenty geese Ithaca, ancient Greece · c. 8th century BCE
- An ox with two tails Luozhou (Luoyang), China · c. 650 (Tang)