Anecdote collection · People & kin
My late husband came back to mend the house
Pengcheng (Xuzhou), China · 5th century
其妻泣擁稚子曰：「汝父若在，豈至於此！」其夜夢沙門將數十人料理宅舍，明日完矣。
His widow, weeping and holding their small child, said: “If your father were alive, it would never have come to this!” That night she dreamed that Shamen came with dozens of men to repair the house — and the next day it was whole.
Open this dream in the galaxy →
- Source
- Taiping Guangji, dream volumes 276–282 — Li Fang et al. (compilers), 978
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Pengcheng (Xuzhou), China · Chinese
- Date
- 5th century
- Uncertainty
- High — Anecdote preserved in the Taiping Guangji (978); the dream is reported, not first-hand.
- Imagery
- Partner · House · Crowd · Storm · Child
- Feelings
- Grief · Relief · 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
- Why is the babe weeping? Russia · 1880 (novel)
- A fire in a hotel in a strange city Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1913
- Dreaming of my late wife at her window Mizhou (Zhucheng, Shandong), China · 20th day of the 1st lunar month, 1075
- A mother praying for a father who never returns Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- Who is dead in the White House? Washington, D.C., USA · early April 1865 (as reported)
- The earthquake is coming Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1910