Crossing a Bridge of Dreams

 

From a thousand years ago, in a slim “I-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, “The Day-Record of Sarashina”). The translator of the Penguin edition, Ivan Morris, decided to import a title from an even older poem, “As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams.”
     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. Morris, suggests that their extraordinary accomplishments “produced an unconscious resentment among male scholars, with the result that these talented ladies were permanently condemned to anonymity.” One of them was this author’s aunt, who wrote a searing tale of jealousy, Kagero Nikki (“Gossamer Years”).
    By convention, the anonymous author of Bridge of Dreams is called Lady Sarashina,  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 in Kyoto, 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.

    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.
    She loved stories and romances, and the first dreams she records – one features a “handsome priest” – came in the midst of her binge reading of women’s writing like the  Tales of Genji. 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 that "the author of Sarashina Nikki can be regarded as the first person in Japanese literature to have discovered dreams…Her dreams are not fortuitous interludes but are consciously grasped as having a definite, inevitable meaning.” This 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.
    Sarashina Nikki resembles the modern Japanese genre known as the sh-shosetsu, the “I-novel”, in which the author weaves facts of his life together with imagination.

Illustration: Toyohara Chikanobu, Viewing Maple Leaves in the Tenth Month, 1897

A mirror for the Sun Goddess

One of my favorite teaching stories about soul loss and soul recovery comes from Japan. It is a mythic tale of Amaterasu Omikami, the Japanese sun goddess, and it offers a wonderful script for soul healing.
     The beloved sun goddess Amaterasu is shamed and abused by a raging male, her stormy brother/consortt Susanowo, who is a hero when is comes to fighting monsters but is no hero in the family home. They have had children together, born magically from gifts they have given each other – three girls from Susanowo’s sword and five boys from the jewels of Amaterasu.

     But Susanowo plays spoiler, smearing excrement where Amaterasu made fertile fields and crops, throwing a horse that is sacred to the goddess into the midst of her intimate weaving circle, and so on. The storm god’s violence reaches the point where Amaterasu takes refuge in a rock cave. And the light goes from the world.
      In her dark cavern the once radiant goddess sits brooding on the past, sinking deeper and deeper into feelings of guilt and shame. Maybe she starts telling herself that what has happened is somehow her fault, that she failed her consort in some important way, that she failed to give what was needed. In the depths, she has lost her inner light, while the world has lost her radiance. The myriad gods and goddesses are desperate to call the sun back.

     They try many ruses to lure Amaterasu out of the dark cave. They call on a wise god, whose name means Keeper of Thoughts, to advise them. He usually keeps his best ideas to himself, but the cold and darkness in the world have got him worried too. So he counsels the gods to gather all the roosters than can be relied to crow at dawn. He tells the gods to hang a mirror with strands of jewels on the branches of a Sakaki tree at the entrance of Amaterasu’s cave. The gods do this, decorating the tree with bright cloth banners, without fully understanding the plan. The cocks crow, the gods whoop and howl. And Amaterasu stays in her cave.

      Now one of her sister goddesses, Uzume, comes up with a plan of her own. Uzume is the goddess of mirth and revelry. She is also called the Great Persuader and the Heavenly Alarming Woman. Now we see why. Uzume overturns a tub near the mouth of the rock cave, strips off her clothes like a professional, and moves into a wild, sexy dance that has the gods laughing and bellowing with delight. Amaterasu is curious. Why is everyone having so much fun? She approaches the mouth of her cave and demands to know what is going on. Uzume calls back to her, “We’ve found you the perfect lover. Come and see.”

     Suspicious, Amaterasu peeks around the edge of the boulder she placed at the cave mouth to shut out the world. And she is awed and fascinated to see a figure of radiant beauty looking back at her. She is drawn, irresistibly, to this beauty, and comes up out of the darkness – to discover that the radiant being is her own beautiful self, reflected in the mirror the gods have hung in a tree near the cave. Now the god of Strength rushes out and holds Amaterasu, gently but firmly, to restrain her from going back into the dark. Another god places a magic rope across the entrance to the cave.

    Gods of passion and delight lead Amaterasu back into the assembly of the gods, and her light returns to the world. This is a marvelous collective dream of how soul recovery and soul healing become possible when we help each other to look in the mirror of the greater Self.

     Mirrors hang in the temples of Amaterasu today, to remind us to look for the goddess or god in ourselves. When we locate the drama of Amaterasu in our own lives, we begin to make a mirror for the radiance of the larger Self that can help to bring us, and those we love, up from the dark places.
     In some of my workshops, we have taken the story of Amaterasu's descent to the Underworld and turned it into a shamanic theater of soul recovery, with amazing results. However, the unfortunate cast as Susanowo must be depossessed of his role, and then welcomed back into the circle as a "new man", healed and enlightened. This can be profoundly healing too.

Graphic: Amaterasu returning from the Underworld, returning light to the world. By Utagawa Kunisada , 19th century. Public domain.