Anecdote collection · People & kin
Two ghosts plotting to enter my father
Taiyuan, China · Tang (undated)
偶於父床邊坐睡。夢一鬼相語，欲入其父腹中。一鬼曰：「若何為入。」一鬼曰：「待食漿水粥，可隨粥而入。」
Exhausted, he fell asleep sitting by his father’s sickbed and dreamed of ghosts talking, planning to get into his father’s belly. One said, “How shall we get in?” The other said, “Wait till he eats the rice porridge, and we can go in with it.”
Open this dream in the galaxy →
- Source
- Taiping Guangji, dream volumes 276–282 — Li Fang et al. (compilers), 978
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Taiyuan, China · Chinese
- Date
- Tang (undated)
- Uncertainty
- High — Anecdote preserved in the Taiping Guangji (978); the dream is reported, not first-hand.
- Imagery
- Father · Food · A stranger
- Feelings
- Fear · Tenderness
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
- Falling from the palace hall Chang’an, China · c. 750
- Pigs on the edge of a cliff Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- The acrobat who never touched the floor England · before 1911
- A fire in a hotel in a strange city Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1913
- My father sinking into a lake of mire Ayodhya (setting) · c. 5th–4th c. BCE (epic)
- The animals fell out of Noah’s ark Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1910