Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.
2026/01/01

“Who stole my sleep?” – the dream market, Edo-style 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

Don’t tell anyone about your dream!

 

In Edo, a dream could be more “public” than a notice and more “material” than a coin. You wake at dawn, the shōji let in a milky light, the ember in the hibachi is dying down—and before you speak your first word, you already know the night has brought something you can lose with one careless “let me tell you.” “Hanasu” means “to say” (話す), but also “to let go” (放す)—a pun that turned dream-telling into a taboo. A dream here was not only a private film: it could be a sign, a charge, at times almost a currency. In a city that lived on contracts, gossip, and the circulation of everything (rice, information, opportunities), even night visions began to move about like something that can be stored, passed on, sold and bought—and even… stolen.

 

Because Edo knew things we laugh at today, and then suddenly fall silent: a New Year auction for hatsuyume, where the price rises to an absurd 70 ryō; sellers of “takarabune” pictures calling “Otakara! Otakara!”; professional “dream-reading,” in which an interpreter could become someone hovering on the border between adviser, fortune-teller—and, in a popular tale, a co-perpetrator of “dream theft.”

 

We are near the beginning of the year—a time when hatsuyume can happen to us—so it is worth checking how to read it… Edo-style! In today’s text we will see Edo’s “dream operating system”: from vocabulary to gestures, from household dream manuals to urban specialists, from rituals for reversing a bad dream to amulets placed by the pillow. No esoteric mists—just specifics: the names of practices, kanji, sample formulas, the realities of print and the market, and a question that returns like a refrain: was this “trade in dreams” really so absurd? Or is something else behind that nervous laughter? Some strange resemblance to… the 21st century?

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

Skittish dreams in Edo

 

Imagine a morning in Edo: paper shōji doors let in a milky light, the charcoal in the hibachi still glows faintly, and the house—before it begins to speak with the sounds of morning haste—falls silent for a moment. This silence is not only a “mood”: in many beliefs and pieces of advice from the Edo period, a dream was treated as something real, susceptible to damage, even to being “lost” if you push it too quickly into words. Texts repeat the idea that a dream—good or bad—should remain hidden, and speaking of it was sometimes considered dangerous: they even recorded a prohibition of the type “night dreams must not be told” (夜夢をかたるべからず).

 

Interestingly, this prohibition was sometimes explained through a linguistic intuition: “to speak” (話す) sounds like “to let loose” / “to release” (放す)—so telling a dream is like letting it slip out of your hands, dispersing it, depriving it of power.

A dream in Edo could be a message from many directions at once—from the body (in the perspective of “Eastern medicine”), from fate, from the order of gods and spirits—but above all it was a “thing” to be handled carefully, because a word can both confer meaning and strip away agency.

 

In New Year practice, this caution condensed especially around hatsuyume, the first “lucky” dream—and sources show a very concrete, domestic technique for “inviting” a good image: placing under the pillow an image of takarabune, the “treasure ship”; this was recorded as a custom observed on the night of the second day of the New Year. It was not about grand metaphysics, only a simple, material gesture: the picture goes where the head goes—because it is by the pillow that the night lottery of signs is drawn (about the role of the first dream of the year in Japan—hatsuyume—I write more here: Hatsuyume – The First Dream of the Year: Planning a Year with Strength, Wisdom, and Discipline).

 

And if you got something “bad”? Then the logic of action was equally concrete: do not spread it around, do not inflate it—rather get rid of the dream before it “sticks” to the day. Sources show that formulas and small procedures performed upon waking were in circulation—precisely because telling a dream was taboo: if you are not allowed to speak, you must act. Among such practices appears a very evocative motif of “unsticking” a bad dream from a person and “sticking” it onto something external: in incantations a phrase returns, that:

 

“a good dream should become a jewel, and a bad dream should cling to grasses and trees”

 

悪夢著草木・吉夢成宝玉

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

A dictionary of the period

How did Edo name dreams and their varieties?

 

In Edo, a dream was not a uniform “yume” (夢)—a private film running behind the eyelids—but a phenomenon with shades, weight, and consequences. The character 夢 itself (read ゆめ; in compounds often also the on’yomi ボウ) beautifully fits this mentality: the sign looks like something happening “under cover” and “after dark,” in a zone of half-light where meanings are at once true and elusive. An etymological curiosity invoked in cultural studies: “yume” is sometimes linked with the idea of “dreaming eyes,” “sleep-eyes” (寝目), which immediately sets the dream as a visual experience, but not quite “of this world”—a seeing that is not looking (much more about the meaning of the kanji “yume” you can read here: Dream is a path, dreams are light, desires are chains. How not to lose our way? Let us read the kanji: 夢 (yume).).

 

There are more Edo-period expressions connected with dreams: 夢占 (divination from dreams), 夢解き (literally “untying/solving a dream,” i.e., translating it into meaning), 夢合わせ (matching a dream with a “key”—a table of symbols and rules of interpretation), and also 夢判断—judgment, a decision about what to do with the dream (whether to keep silent, to reverse it, to treat it as a sign). These words matter because they show that a dream is something processed—like a document, an omen, a task.

 

Edo’s axis of division is very practical: a dream could be either auspicious or, alternatively, threatening. Hence 吉夢 (“a good dream,” a promise of fortune), sometimes also 好夢 (“an auspicious dream”), and on the opposite side: 凶夢 (“a bad dream”), 悪夢 (“a nightmare”), and in texts you even encounter the stronger 噩夢—as if a “heavy” dream, ominous, impossible to ignore. This is not merely a scale of emotion: these are categories of risk. A dream named wrongly or “handled” wrongly could—in the imagination of the era—bring a real effect, so around it grew protective procedures, incantations, and rules of restraint.

 

And here we reach one of the most fascinating entries in Edo’s lexicon: silence. In sources, the formula “夜夢をかたるべからず” returns—“you must not tell a night dream,” and beside it a pun that says everything about the era’s mentality: “放す=話す” (hanasu). The same sound hanasu can be written as “to tell” (話す) and as “to release” (放す)—so speaking a dream becomes “releasing” it, losing control over it, even spoiling potential good or pulling evil down upon oneself. In this logic, a dream is something that also exists as a “charge”—language can disarm it or detonate it.

 

If language can harm, you also need a category of “a dream to be reversed”—and here appears 夢違え (yumechigae): literally “switching a dream,” “mistaking a dream,” i.e., a ritual and the idea that a bad dream can be made ineffective. Around this grew religious practices and iconography, such as the famous “夢違観音”—Kannon (one of the bodhisattvas) for “reversing” (changing) bad dreams into good, which shows how firmly this category took root in piety and everyday life.

 

On the other pole stands the dream that “hits the mark”—a fulfilled, true dream (in modern language usually 正夢 - masayume). And here it is worth giving another term right away. Because Edo and earlier traditions liked to distinguish: there are “empty” dreams (虚), “delusional” dreams (妄), arising from bodily imbalance or an overload of thoughts. Texts invoke, for example, Buddhist framings, where some dreams are simply “妄見”—illusory seeing, with no “real matter” underneath—while others may function as a sign or a warning. In other words: not every dream deserves a dream manual, but every dream deserves caution.

 

And finally, the key entry that binds language to practice: time. Sources present a principle of holding back— a dream (especially a strong one, especially potentially dangerous) is something that for a while should be “kept unsaid,” stored within oneself, before one proceeds to 夢解き (yume-toki—reading the dream) or 夢合わせ yume-awase (“matching” the dream, more technical). This works like a psychological fuse: do not wind up fear with a story, do not feed the image with a word, let the dream cool a little—and only then decide whether to interpret, reverse, or “release” it (and how).

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

The greatest taboo and the strangest “trade” in Edo

 

In Edo, a dream could be treated as something surprisingly fragile: not only an image in the head, but a “thing” you can harm with one movement of the tongue. Dream manuals and advice books repeat an almost dogmatic rule: “do not tell a dream”—especially right after waking. The formula appears outright: “夜夢をかたるべからず” (“a night dream must not be told”). As we remember: “hanasu” means “to speak,” but also “to release.” This is not an innocent kanji game: releasing a dream is dispersing its power, exposing it to another’s envy, and sometimes even reversing good fortune into misfortune.

 

Importantly, this taboo did not arise solely from shame (“what will people say?”), but from belief in effect. Sources show a belief that a dream—good or bad—changes status when it enters the world of words. A good one may “run away” or fail to come true; a bad one may “stick,” because it has been given the nourishment of attention. That is why practical texts show a cool, procedural consequence: if you are not allowed to tell it, you must act differently—by gesture, formula, silence. In one popular set of recommendations (older in origin than Edo, but recopied and used in Edo), there is even an “emergency” instruction: after a nightmare say nothing (principle: 不語之), quickly “knock your teeth” seven times (principle: 叩歯七遍), and then perform a water ritual (以含水向東方噀之 - “(holding) water in your mouth, turn to the east and spray/spit it (in that direction)”). And only then could you return to your day.

 

And one more detail that beautifully shows the mentality of Edo’s inhabitants: sources mention a rule of protective time. A dream—especially a strong one, especially an unsettling one—was something you should keep silent about for three days; only later could you “work it” with interpretation. In one fragment this logic is heard directly: “夢を見て三日三夜慎めば…”—“if after a dream you keep caution for three days and three nights,” only then can you more safely enter into meanings. And if someone truly wanted to preserve a dream but not “release” it into words, there was an elegant workaround: writing. The tradition of recording dreams (among monks and scholars—as a spiritual exercise, a form of memory, material for self-reflection) worked as a compromise: the dream is “kept,” but not thrown into the circulation of gossip.

 

And now the other side of the same coin: if a dream is fragile and should not be spread around, then at the same time… it can be guarded like property. And that brings us to one of Edo’s more “insane” ideas: a dream as a good that changes owner—something that can be sold, taken over, even stolen.

 

In stories and anecdotes (often older, but alive in Edo circulation), a dream functions like a “packet of fate”: if you learn its content, you can take over part of its effect. A famous example is the story “夢買ふ人の事” (“On the man who bought dreams”) from “宇治拾遺物語” (“Uji shūi monogatari,” a setsuwa already from the Kamakura period), where a professional dream interpreter plays the key role—夢解きの女 (yume-toki no onna). The plot is like a crime story: the theft of someone else’s dream content, and then an attempt to “assign” it to oneself through arrangement, knowledge, and cunning. The source we are working with calls it outright a “method of dream theft” (夢窃盗) and shows that this is not a metaphor, but an imagination of a real transfer of fortune.

 

An even more “market” version of this imagination is the motif of buying and selling hatsuyume. Sources present a story known as “夢見小僧” (“The Dream Boy”), circulating in many versions: on New Year’s Day a master gathers the servants and promises money for a good dream—as long as it is the first dream of the year, even without any special content. And the bidding begins: a boy stubbornly refuses to “sell” the dream, prices rise, and in one version it reaches the absurd sum of twenty ryō—and importantly, the text emphasizes not so much the boy’s greed as the buyer’s obsession: rage not because of the price, but because of the “lost opportunity” (this man had authentic FOMO), as in speculation or an “investment opportunity.” The author of the source compares it directly to the logic of a transaction, where the mere fact that you could have come into possession of something lucky becomes more important than common sense.

 

And here it becomes historically interesting, because Edo also knew a version of “selling a dream” that was entirely real—only more “material” than in legends. We have testimony from the Edo-Tokyo Museum’s holdings: vendors walked the city selling an image of “takarabune” (宝船, “the treasure ship” with the Seven Gods of Fortune, more about this here: When the Gods Laugh Out Loud – Japan’s Shichifukujin, or Seven Eccentrics on the Path of Lightness and Grace) and shouted “お宝、お宝” (“treasures, treasures!”). You bought the picture, placed it under your pillow, and recited three times the famous palindromic poem (廻文):

 

「長き夜の遠の眠りの皆目ざめ、波乗り船の音のよきかな」


(nakaki yo no tō no neburi no mina mezame, nami nori fune no oto no yoki kana.)


“In the long night, from deep sleep everyone wakes—how pleasant is the sound of a boat gliding over the waves.”

 

This was meant to “invite” a good first nocturnal omen. And if the dream was bad, the practice was equally concrete: you let the picture float away with the river’s current, as if physically carrying misfortune out of the house.

 

Do you see how it interlocks? The taboo of speaking a dream’s content and the trade in dreams are not two different worlds, but one system. If speaking “releases” a dream (話す/放す), then the dream becomes something that can circulate like a coin: it can be released, kept, transferred, and sometimes even taken away—by eavesdropping, by writing, by purchasing a talisman, or by a reversing ritual. That is why, in Edo, alongside dream manuals there also flourished “technologies of dream control”: silence as protection, writing as a safe, a picture under the pillow as the purchase of luck, and the ritual with water and the east as rapid deactivation of a nightmare.

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

The dream market

What the real logic of trading in dreams looked like in Edo

 

In Edo, the “trade in dreams” worked like a seasonal market: it appeared suddenly, thickened around New Year, and vanished just as quickly, leaving behind only gossip, overheated emotions, and the feeling that someone “bought luck” while someone else slept through the chance. First came demand—usually in the household of someone wealthy enough to afford a whim masquerading as ritual.

 

This is the first key to understanding the market: the commodity is not the psychological content of the dream, but the mere fact of possessing the “first dream,” treated like a New Year’s lottery ticket.

 

Then came the phase of “valuation”—and here Edo shows its claws. The transaction starts from a small coin: in the previously cited story, the amount is 一分 (ichibu), i.e., one quarter of a ryō, and then the price rises: 二分, 三分… until at last it reaches a grotesque level—二十両 (20 ryō).

 

And so that the Reader feels the weight of these numbers: in the gold currency system of the era, 1 ryō = 4 bu (分). The text itself even adds that those 20 ryō are “big money.” For comparison: 6 ryō was the sum for one year of work by a skilled laborer. Or put differently—it was the value of 20 koku of rice, i.e., sustenance in rice for 20 years of life.

 

Most interesting, however, is why the price rises. Because it does not rise “for the quality of the dream”—the buyer often does not even know its content. It rises for rarity and risk, a bit as if dreams were exotic altcoins on the cryptocurrency market. The source makes the comparison directly: the buyer’s stubbornness resembles the mechanics of a stock-market transaction, where a person is not furious because someone has bid up the price, but because he failed to close the transaction and loses the “opportunity”—classic anger from FOMO.

In other words: in this market the most valuable thing was not “what you dreamed,” but that you have something that can be bought at all—and the buyer feels that if he does not buy now, the year will begin without a talisman.

 

In the next step the market reveals its second pillar: what exactly is being sold. Sometimes what is sold is the “dream” as abstract luck (as if a packet of grace for the whole year), but in many stories it is more down-to-earth: what is sold is the “story of the dream”—a report the buyer wants to hear. And here Edo’s paradox is brilliant: if normally you should not easily release a dream into words, then the story becomes a luxury good—something you can get only if you pay and if the other side agrees.

 

Of course, Edo would not be Edo if it ended there. There was also a “retail market,” far more real and mass: you did not buy someone else’s dream; you bought yourself a tool to attract good dreams. And here enter the famous sellers of takarabune pictures, who at New Year walked through the city calling “お宝、お宝” (“Otakara! Otakara!”), selling a woodblock print of the “Treasure Ship.” You placed the picture under your pillow and recited three times the palindromic poem about a boat gliding over the waves. In this version, the “trade in dreams” was thus less a purchase of an omen from a person than a purchase of a chance—like buying an amulet, a lottery ticket, or today: a “premium package” for a better start.

 

And one more thing worth seeing: this market worked because Edo was a city of contracts and circulation. Notice that in the stories the price matters not because the author likes numbers, but because the price is proof of belief in transfer: if you pay more and more, that means you truly think a dream is something that can be “reclipped” from one person to another. That is why the buyer’s stubbornness in these stories is always similar: it is a person who cannot bear the thought that someone else might have a “good start to the year,” while he will be left empty-handed—without a dream, without a sign, without a narrative that organizes chance.

 

And here the comparison to modernity imposes itself (without moralizing): sometimes we no longer buy a “dream,” but we buy the feeling that we did not miss something. For a moment, let us think about this in silence. Is Edo’s dream market really so absurd—compared with today’s trade in “dreams”?

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

Edo dream manuals

 

In Edo, a “dream manual” was not mystical knowledge from a monastery or a secret handbook for the chosen few, but a very concrete object of everyday use: a small printed book to leaf through after waking—one you kept at home beside a calendar, an almanac, and advice books for every occasion (yes, yes—ordinary Edo residents of the 18th century kept such things at home—they were common—like literacy).

 

The circulation of dream manuals was mass: there were “pure” dream books, but just as often dream interpretations formed part of popular compendia of the “大雑書” (daizassho) type—multi-purpose almanacs where, alongside choosing “good days” for travel or marriage, there were chapters explicitly named “夢の弁” (yume no ben, “on matters of dreams”), “運勢弁” (unsei ben, “on fate”), or “縁起弁” (engi ben, “on omens”).

 

Importantly: these books did not work like psychotherapy (“what does your dream say about you”), but like a practical instruction manual for signs (“what does it mean” and “what to do with it”). That is why in many titles the verb “合”—“to match, to align”—repeats: yume-awase is not romantic “arranging a dream,” but matching the dream’s content to a ready-made catalogue of omens. In sources you can even see this as “procedures”: “夢合延寿袋大成” (“Yumeawase Enju-bukuro Taisei”) was an illustrated book reprinted many times throughout the Edo period, and inside—besides entries—it even gave a formula to be spoken three times after waking (so the book was simultaneously a dream manual and an operating instruction).

 

On such a domestic “shelf of night visions” very different things could stand side by side: from the oldest, “learned” attempts to Japanize Chinese models—such as “諸夢吉凶和語鈔” (Shomukikkyō Wagoshō, 1713), described by researchers as a translation/adaptation of the Chinese tradition—to later popular editions with catchy titles like “夢うらない” (yume-uranai), “弘化新版ゆめはんじ” (Kōka shinpan yume-hanji), or “新板ゆめあわせ” (shinpan yumeawase).

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

A catalogue of the world in miniature—according to dream manuals

 

An Edo dream manual is like a miniature encyclopedia of reality, only arranged not by science but by a “sensitivity to fate”: the body, the home, the road, money, dirt, animals, fire, water—and above all this a thin layer of the invisible world. The era’s reflex is key: a dream is not a private film, but an “event” that has weight in the world (sometimes as an omen, sometimes as a signal from a nonhuman order, sometimes as a reflection of the body’s state).

 

Most “surprising” to the modern reader are usually those entries we would today consider shameful or “dirty”—yet in dream manuals they function as a hard economy of symbol. Sources show excellently an entire chain of tradition: from Chinese “daily compendia” and specialized dream books, through anecdotes that fix meaning, to a simple rule that becomes a cultural meme. The most striking example: feces and urine as money. In authentic materials there are even sentences like a catalogue entry (“in a dream, a huge pile on the ground—profit”), along with the mechanism of justification: “財本是糞土” (“wealth by nature is ‘a pile of earth’”), therefore a dream of filth can be a dream of money.

 

Similarly, a coffin (棺) can mean promotion/office, because “官本是臭腐” (“office by nature is ‘stinking’ / entangled with decay”). This is not a poetic metaphor—this is the logic of hard, folk realism that the dream manual turns into a fixed table of equivalences.

 

In parallel runs a second great section: animals, fertility, and “dream-signs” concerning the future of the lineage. For example: in interpretations of the “胎夢” (taimu, pregnancy dreams) type, one could read the sex and “character” of the child through an animal sign—“a snake as a woman,” “a bear as a boy.”

 

And finally, a third axis: the world in pictures. When a dream manual is e-iri (“絵入”—illustrated), it begins to resemble not so much a dictionary as a small theatre: you see the symbol before you read it. An ideal example is “夢合長寿鑑絵抄” (yumeawase chōju kagami eshō)—an edition from the mid-19th century, where the illustration is the main part and the text only fastens the meaning. Such things in Edo could be partly hand-colored and had a format convenient for domestic use—a booklet for the hand, not a tome for a scholar’s lectern.

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

Baku and other “protective tools”

 

In Edo, a dream was treated like a fragment of the house that can be arranged: under one’s head there was not only fabric and wood, but an entire “night zone” with its own safeguards, as if a person slept in the shadow of invisible doors. In this zone reigns baku—獏, the character with the “animal” radical 犭 and the element 莫; in old Chinese descriptions it is a creature that devours metals (it was also said to be a yōkai with iron or bamboo “bones”), but in Japan the meaning shifted in a very practical direction: it “eats nightmares,” so it can “clean up” the night. Edo sources show that this was not only a fairy tale, but also a custom: “baku-fuda” existed—slips/pictures with baku placed under the pillow, and with time there also appeared “baku-makura” (literally “baku pillow”), i.e., objects with protective ambition rather than decorative.

 

Most “tangible” is the fact that such things were truly made—and have survived as museum objects. An almost model example: a lacquered pillow in the maki-e technique with an image of baku and a plant motif (often accompanied by auspicious signs), where the function is clear: it is a pillow, but also an amulet in a usable form. In Edo, such “fuses” could be both a luxury (for wealthier houses) and something more “paper,” mass—an image, a talisman, a slip. And alongside baku appears a second impulse, very Edo-like: a dream can not only be “eaten,” it can also be “reversed.”

 

Here enters the “Yumechigai Kannon” mentioned at the beginning—夢違観音. This is not an abstraction from a legend, but a concrete reality: at Hōryū-ji there is a venerated image known as “Yumechigai Kannon,” and the name itself suggests the function—if the night brought a bad sign, one can ask for a “switching of the points” of fate. Interestingly, Kannon holds a small vessel/bottle (胡瓶)—in Buddhist symbolism often associated with “what is stored” (medicine, elixir, good), which fits perfectly the Edo intuition that a dream is something one can keep, transfer, purify.

 

And one more thing: Kannon is the bodhisattva of compassion—originally the Indian Avalokiteśvara, in Japan often depicted in a softened, “female” form (in quotation marks, because theoretically a bodhisattva has no gender).

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

Who had the right to “read” dreams?

 

The boundary ran less between “religion” and “entertainment,” and more between what suffices at home and what requires someone with competence. The domestic side is simple: a dream manual from the bookshop, a conversation with a loved one (sometimes delayed by the taboo), a picture under the pillow, a protective ritual. But when a dream began to smell like “a sign too heavy”—illness, travel, risk, an official matter, an unsettling recurring motif—the world of specialists was activated.

 

In literature and accounts appears the notion of “yume-toki”—夢解き (literally “untangling/solving a dream”), which is not only an action. There existed an institution of a “woman of dreams” (夢解きの女), to whom one went to have the night interpreted. This matters, because it shows that alongside household books there also existed an interpretive service—embedded in the world of miko/fortune-tellers, urban practitioners, sometimes on the border between the sacred and a craft. And linguistic scholarly studies confirm that words like 夢解・夢解き could mean both “interpretation” and “a person who interprets” (i.e., a specialist).

 

In parallel functioned a more “technical” order, connected with the calendar, directions, auspicious days: onmyōdō and its specialists. Even if in Edo the role of state onmyōdō structures was different than in Heian, the logic remained recognizable: there are matters in which people want to consult time, direction, risk—not only “symbol.” And this connects to everyday practice: in the age of print, calendars and almanacs with information about “days” and “signs” circulated, giving an ordinary city resident the feeling that part of the world’s invisible mechanics can be read like a table.

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

The Edo dream manual restored harmony

 

Edo needed dream manuals for the same reason we need a weather forecast, a calendar, and bank statements: so as not to go through life entirely “blind.” A dream manual arranged uncertainty into small, digestible entries; rituals were a hygiene of fear—quick cleaning after a nightmare before it spills into the whole day; and the taboo against speaking dreams protected something intimate and at the same time efficacious, as if a dream were a delicate letter that is easy to crumple in your fingers if you show it to the world at once. None of this requires naïve faith in magic: it is enough to understand that in a great city, where a person has a thousand reasons for tension, culture is also built so as to have at least a few “procedures” that restore order.

 

And perhaps that is why Edo’s logic is not exotic at all. We too have our “baku”: fast scrolling to drown out anxiety, a cup of coffee as a talisman, and nervous checking whether “it has already happened” before it happens. The difference is that Edo did not pretend to be fully rational—it simply built a practical dream operating system: a bit of language, a bit of print, a bit of ritual, a bit of silence.

 

The next time you wake from a strange dream, you can smile: somewhere in the shadow of shōji, long ago and far away, someone in a similar moment fell silent, knocked their teeth seven times, looked to the east… and also tried to begin the day so that the night would not dictate the whole year.

 

Dreams in Edo were an omen, a taboo, and a commodity. Dream manuals, “dream readers,” baku, rituals for reversing nightmares, and the trade in hatsuyume—specifics, kanji, and the realities of the era.

 

>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:

 

Machiya: What Were the Townhouses of Edo Like? – The Lives of Ordinary People During the Shogunate

 

Honor Did Not Belong Only to the Samurai – Bravery, Courage, and the Ethos of Life of the machi-shū

 

The Nightmare from "The Ring" Inspired by a Story from Medieval Japan – Peer into the Darkness of the Well at Himeji Castle

 

Obsession with Self-Destruction: How Yayoi Kusama's Art Delves into the Nightmare of Mental Illness

 

A Country Without Banks – The Monetary System of the Shoguns and Credit Measured in Honor and Shame in Edo Japan

 

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 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

 

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未開    ソビエライ

 

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

 

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.- Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Zdjęcie Mike Soray (aka Michał Sobieraj)

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