A lecture course of the 1890s has a long run of sections on dreams — their causes, the old accounts, the European accounts, sleep, nightmare.
The section on the reimu, the numinous dream, sits in the middle of that and is not like the rest of it. Where the others argue, this one lists. It is a file of reports sent in by readers, each with a name, a prefecture, and a date, and it is one of the densest concentrations of place-names anywhere in the work.
What makes it worth an article is not that the dreams came true. It is that the people involved kept trying to check.
The shortest case first, because it sets the type.
A correspondent in Kumamoto prefecture reported this. On the eighth of the seventh month of 1890, at four in the afternoon, he was at a house some seven ri from the city, and he dozed for about twenty minutes.
In the doze he dreamed he was looking at a postcard — a postcard sent by himself, with a particular message on it.
He woke. A little after five o’clock the post arrived.
That is the whole report, and notice what kind of claim it is. Not a vision of a death or a warning from a god. A man dreams a piece of routine mail and then receives it. The interval is one hour, and he gives the clock times for both ends of it.
One of the reports is not about death at all, and it is the only thing of its kind in this part of the book.
A correspondent in the north kept small birds, tame enough to show no fear of people. On the night of the nineteenth of the eleventh month of 1888, one of them came to his pillow and made a speech.
I was taken by mistake, it said, and lost the freedom of the open sky, and I have been kept in your house a year now. A cage is not what I would have wished. But I have been well fed and have come to no harm, and how should I not be grateful to your household for its kindness.
And then: but now something is watching me, and I am about to fall into its claws.
A man dreams that his pet thanks him for a year of good food and tells him, politely, that the cat is coming.
The central case is dated 1893, and the reason to write this article.
A man in Mikawa received, in a dream, a message about where his younger brother had died.
The brother had left home at twenty-six. In the dream he came to his brother’s pillow and gave an account of himself: that on a pilgrimage to Konpira he had got as far as a village in a district of Bizen, and had helped out here and there for a while; and that seventeen years ago — that is, in 1877 — in that village he had caught a chill that turned into a fever, and had lain ill for about twenty-six days, and had died there.
Then the details that are not the kind of thing a consoling dream supplies. He had died in a distant province with nobody to nurse him. He had been carried out to the crossroads hall of the village. And he had not even been given the water of the last moment.
He did not go to a priest, and he did not go to a medium.
He wrote a letter to the village office of the place named in the dream — in another prefecture entirely, on the other side of the country from where he lived — and asked whether it was true.
And the village office answered him. A clerk there, together with the headman, looked into it and replied in writing that the facts were exactly as stated, without discrepancy.
That is a dream tested by correspondence with local government, and the test was passed, and the result was printed in a magazine in December 1893 and then reprinted in a book written to explain such things away.
I have not been able to think of a neater illustration of what this period was actually like. The brother’s ghost arrives in a dream in the manner of the twelfth century. What happens next involves the postal service, a village registry, a named clerk, a headman, and a written reply.
One more, because it shows the ordinary version.
A correspondent in Shizuoka had been in government employment since 1879. In the second month of 1886 he left home on official business to a place some ten ri off and stayed several days.
On the night of the twenty-eighth, his wife dreamed that her husband’s father, carrying a paper lantern, was wandering on a riverbank — and then that he had gone into the water. She woke. She went back to sleep, and the dream took up again where it had stopped, and this time she heard a place-name called out.
She woke at sunrise with the light already on the window, got up, and rinsed her mouth.
The report goes on from there. What is worth holding onto is the shape of it: the interruption, the resumption at the same point, and the detail that arrives on the second pass — the name of a place, which is the only part of the dream that could ever be checked.
There is one more thing in this section, easy to read past, that belongs with the village office.
Describing a different case, the account notes that the objects concerned were still kept at a particular house — and it gives the house’s street address, down to the lot number, with the remark that anyone at all who goes there can see them.
A book of debunking, printing an address so that readers can go and look for themselves.
Set the pieces together and this section is doing something the rest of the volume is not.
Elsewhere the author explains; here he mostly prints, and what he prints are attempts at verification made by other people before the material ever reached him. A man times his dream against the arrival of the post. A brother writes to a village office and gets an official reply. A wife’s dream yields a place-name, which is to say a testable item. And the book hands the reader an address.
None of it settles anything about dreams. The postcard could be coincidence, the village office could have been confirming what the letter had already told it, and a place-name in a dream may have been heard while awake and forgotten.
But the instinct on display is the one this site cares about. Everybody in this section, including the ghost, is trying to be specific enough to be caught out.
The reading in “What Was Being Built” is KWAIDANOTE’s own.
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