{"id":4477,"date":"2015-02-26T10:40:02","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T15:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=4477"},"modified":"2015-02-26T11:17:09","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T16:17:09","slug":"as-lady-sarashina-crossed-a-bridge-of-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2015\/02\/as-lady-sarashina-crossed-a-bridge-of-dreams.html","title":{"rendered":"As Lady Sarashina crossed a bridge of dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
“Reflected moon on paddy fields at Sarashina”, woodblock by Ando Hiroshige<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From a thousand years ago, in a slim autobiographical novel gusting with moonlight and desire, we have a dozen dreams of an anonymous Japanese woman who was born in Kyoto in 1008. The book itself is untitled; sometimes it is called the Sarashina Nikki<\/em> (literally, \u201cThe Day-Record of Sarashina\u201d). The translator of the Penguin edition, Ivan Morris, decided to import a title from an even older work, a poem titled, \u201cAs I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n

The author, whose name is unknown, belonged to a remarkable group of Japanese women writers of the tenth and eleventh centuries. We know almost nothing of their lives, not even their names. A modern editor suggests that their extraordinary accomplishments \u201cproduced an unconscious resentment among male scholars, with the result that these talented ladies were permanently condemned to anonymity.\u201d One of them was this author\u2019s aunt, who wrote a searing tale of jealousy, Kagero Nikki <\/em>(\u201cGossamer Years\u201d).<\/p>\n

By convention, the anonymous author of Bridge<\/em> of Dreams<\/em> is called Lady Sarashina,\u00a0 a name borrowed from a mountainous area she probably never visited. The daughter of a minor provincial governor who resented being posted outside the capital, she led a secluded life, mostly behind garden walls inKyoto, until she became a lady-in-waiting to a princess at thirty-one. Her court connection may have helped her to marry at thirty-six, very late in her day; she had children. Her prose style was lovely; the poems that punctuate her recollections (an epistolary mode of the time) are mostly forgettable.<\/p>\n

She told no one her dreams, and failed to take actions suggested by the early dreams in the series. She later regrets failing to act on her dreams, realizing that they could have steered her life on a better course.<\/p>\n

She loved stories and romances, and the first dreams she records \u2013 one features a \u201chandsome priest\u201d \u2013 came in the midst of her binge reading of women\u2019s writing like the \u00a0Tales of Genji<\/em>. Some dreams were experienced at temples, to which she journeyed on pilgrimages that were sometimes cherry-blossom tours, sometimes belated efforts to honor dream directions. Japanese classical scholar Ikeda Kikan says: \u201cThe author of Sarashina Nikki <\/em>can be regarded as the first person in Japanese literature to have discovered dreams\u2026Her dreams are not fortuitous interludes but are consciously grasped as having a definite, inevitable meaning.” \u00a0This is the first Japanese book in which dreams play a central role. Life itself has the quality of dream, a flimsy bridge between different shores.<\/p>\n

Her book resembles the modern Japanese genre known as the sh-shosetsu<\/em>, the \u201cI-novel\u201d, in which the author weaves facts of his life together with imagination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From a thousand years ago, in a slim autobiographical novel gusting with moonlight and desire, we have a dozen dreams of an anonymous Japanese woman who was born in Kyoto in 1008. The book itself is untitled; sometimes it is called the Sarashina Nikki (literally, \u201cThe Day-Record of Sarashina\u201d). The translator of the Penguin edition,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,20,3,29,16],"tags":[1177,1172,1173,1174,1175,1176,1171,1034],"class_list":["post-4477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancestral-traditions","category-history-of-dreaming","category-imagination","category-story","category-writing","tag-as-i-crossed-a-bridge-of-dreams","tag-dreams-in-literature","tag-ivan-morris","tag-japanese-dreams","tag-japanese-women-writers","tag-kyoto-school","tag-lady-sarashina","tag-literary-dreams"],"yoast_head":"\nAs Lady Sarashina crossed a bridge of dreams - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, nofollow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"As Lady Sarashina crossed a bridge of dreams - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From a thousand years ago, in a slim autobiographical novel gusting with moonlight and desire, we have a dozen dreams of an anonymous Japanese woman who was born in Kyoto in 1008. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4477"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6183,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions\/6183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}