Paper short abstract:

This paper examines dreams by and about the emperor as recorded and interpreted in courtiers' diaries of late Heian Japan. Dreams were a precarious site of interactions between humans and spirits, and their interpretation was a means for courtiers to respond to crises of the imperial authority.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines dreams by and about the emperor as recorded and interpreted in courtier diaries of late Heian Japan. Dream interpretation (yumetoki) was widespread in the court; and it became especially active in the face of ontological or social precarity as a means for courtiers to respond to crises of the imperial authority.

A case in point is a strange dream that Japanese courtier Fujiwara Sanesuke (957-1046) recorded and attributed to Emperor Goichijō (1008-1036) in 1025. Possessed by evil spirits, several thousand women invaded his palace. A mysterious man then warned that the only solution to the emperor's situation was to hold the lecture on the Golden Light Sūtra. Upon awakening, the emperor expressed his intention to do so, but Sanesuke disagreed, claiming that, as stated in the Sūtra, righteous imperial rule would ensure that such calamities do not unfold, and therefore, there would be no need to hold the lectures.

This entry reveals two competing interpretations of Goichijō's dream. On the one hand, the "mysterious man" interpreted his nightmare as a psycho-somatic symptom of the emperor's body, symbolized as his palace, requiring a proper ritual prescription. Although the emperor himself agreed with this interpretation, Sanesuke read it as a sign of failing imperial rule that implicitly criticizes the emperor for not upholding the ideal of the righteous rule, as prescribed by the Sūtra. Thus Goichijō's dream and its interpretations point to a classic dilemma of "king's two bodies," the "body natural" and the "body politic," as formulated by Kantorowicz.

I will argue that the members of the Heian court-the emperor, aristocrats, and monks-collectively engaged in the practice of dream interpretation forming what one scholar calls "the dream discourse community" (yumegatari kyōdōtai). This community mediated interactions between humans and spirits. It helped to express and treat fears arising from any cosmological, ontological, or social rapprochement in the imperial court, whether caused by political contention, natural disasters, or the emperor's illness. Dream interpretation was a means to reassert one's sense of being in the world, and of the shared worlds of being(s) here and beings there.