Stuff To Blow Your MindThe wonders and terrors of the dreaming mind do not always flee completely with the dawn. At certain times and places in history, it seems that dreams suddenly ascend to new heights of cultural fascination. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind series, Robert and Joe explore periods when the eye of culture fixes on the dream world.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And we're jumping right into our fourth and final episode in the dream Fall into the Dark series here about the mystique of dreaming, particular times and places where dream culture was especially pronounced. This, of course, won't be our final episode on dreaming, will inevitably come back to dreaming. Dreaming is always something that's going to come up one way or another in the topics we cover on Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
But now, Rob, didn't we begin this whole investigation because you got interested in a dream related monster from Japanese folklore.
That's right, a particular monster that we will be covering in this episode, but it kind of served as the white Rabbit that we pursued and ended up doing three additional episodes, not directly related to it or even its direct dream culture. It is the creature we're going to be talking about, a largely a creature of Japanese dream culture, and so you know, I think it was necessary to talk about much of what we talked about in the previous three episodes to fully appreciate it. But we are going to have to also discuss Japanese dream culture itself before discussing this curious creature.
Right. So, as background, I was looking for a paper on how dreams have been viewed in Japanese culture across history, and I came across one published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences in nineteen ninety five by Shoozo Koyama called Japanese Dreams, Culture and Cosmology. So this is a short article by a researcher named Shooso Koyama, who at the time of the publication worked at the Japanese National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. Now, of course, the way dreams are perceived in Japan across times seems in broad regard to mirror patterns we've seen in other cultures, where there are some people sometimes who regard them more as private internal phenomena with no informational relevance to the external world or no special power. It's not like a place you go, whereas others see them as having a kind of magic or predictive power, or involving genuine interactions with spiritual beings. Both good and bad. But what this paper does is look at a series of historical periods in Japan and try to make a few generalizations about trends in how dreams were perceived and written about in those periods relative to the other periods. So the author begins by looking at the Joman period, which is about ten thousand BCE until about five hundred BCE. This is a time when Japan was occupied by hunter gatherers who lived in small societies. We've talked about the German culture before, especially with regards to their fabrication of clay pots. I think we talked about this in our episode on the Cauldron, and some evidence in early German culture of transitioning from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to a more settled lifestyle, staying in one place. More so, in this period, there are no written records, so it is difficult to have much certainty about the beliefs and psychology of people at the time. However, we can make some guesses based on iconography preserved in artifacts of this culture. So the German people did make figurines out of clay and stone, representing both human and animal forms. The human forms are very often female, often depicted with exaggerated breasts, stomachs, and buttocks, with their faces hidden behind masks. These are sometimes interpreted as goddesses or figures of fertility, or as substitute human beings who are given up as offerings to the gods, and you'll find them in different kinds of archaeological settings, may be left alone in an abandoned dwelling or deposited in a hole in the ground. As for animal forms, one of the most common is apparently the snake. Snake designs are found on many German vessels, and early snake motifs seem to transition into more abstract forms like spirals or waves in later designs. Late German figurines also depict bears and wild boars, but humans and snakes are especially common. This, according to the author, connects to the role of snakes in Japanese mythology. There is a very prominent story where a prince kills or subdues a snake spirit and this act leads to the creation of Japan, and there are also folk tales of snakes that transform into or appear as people. For example, a snake that transforms into a man in order to father children with a human woman, or a man that visits a beautiful woman only to discover that she is actually a snake in disguise, or has a snake spirit revealed and he runs away in terror. Now, to be very clear, there is no proof that any of this imagery comes from dreams, but in this period, because there are no written records of dreams, all you can really do is look at the imagery to try to get a best guess about what kinds of non realistic subject matter preoccupied the early inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago now Koyaman. This article uses the stories of humans with underlying snake spirits to argue that early Japanese culture is infused with animism. Though here I think the author defines animism maybe a little bit differently than I'm used to or than I've seen in some other scholarships. So in this paper, animism is defined as the belief that living beings are composed of two substances, spirit and body, that spirit is intangible and eternal, and that body is visible and tangible but temporal. And of course I'm no expert on the study of religions, but I think think usually or at least more often animism is taken to me in a belief system that you find all around the world, which assumes that not only people, but potentially all things have a sort of soul or spirit or agency. And this can include animals, of course, but also plants, geological features like mountains and rivers, just generally places, weather patterns, even human artifacts or abstract concepts, and in a sense these all can have a spirit, a soul, or a life force with agency, desires, and other qualities of mind. One particular thing that's different here is that I understand animism to notably make little or no distinction between spiritual causes and material causes, whereas this definition of animism, I think, would emphasize exactly that difference. But I don't want to get two sidetracked here. Koyama basically is asserting that that ancient Japanese art and stories point toward a belief dividing the world into a material reality and a spiritual reality that are separate. Now here you go to phase two. This period begins five hundred BCE and goes until roughly the fifth century CE. The historical context is that Koyama says this is when Paddy Ricefield cultivation begins in Japan, probably introduced from practices in China through Korea. Some Chinese documents from this time imply that Japan was probably a large and complex enough society that there were different tribal territories. This is indicated by references to conflicts between them, and during this time there was an influx of new peoples moving in from outside Japan, introducing new cultural elements. There was still plenty of figurative art from this period. Some German conventions continued, and you had depictions of human figures and daily activities. You would find figures depicted hunting, harvesting crops, or seafaring. A lot of animal representations as well, including figurines of birds and dragons, which are not really present in Phase one. Koyama says, it's notable that both of these creatures that show up here can fly, and then writes quote. This coincides with the fact that newcomers believed they were the descendants of celestial gods, while indigenous groups were called offspring of gods of the land in mythology. As a symbol of the sun, mirrors were used by newcomers. A quantity of Chinese bronze mirrors have been excavated from large scale tombs, apparently very important artifacts. Decoration on the backs of some mirrors depict a Taoist cosmology, and it's in this period that we have the first references to dreaming in Japanese culture in written records. There's a collection of Chinese historical texts known as the Way Dynasty Chronicle, which these texts claim that the Queen of Japan, in Coyama's words quote, governed her nation by shamanism, though I'm not quite sure what that means. So there is a collection of Chinese historical texts known as the Way Dynasty chron and these texts make reference to the Queen of Japan, and Koyama says that they claimed that she governed her nation by shamanism. During this time, there was use of oracle bones to tell the future in Japan. Excavated artifacts demonstrate this, so there was a form of There were forms of divination in practice, and dreams, as we know, are very often in basically all cultures, at some points used for divination to try to get access to future information or secret information. There is an eighth century Japanese text tradition known as the Kojiki, which contains a bunch of myths, legends, and alleged historical accounts of Japan up to the seventh century, and it claims that during this period, dreaming was used to decide important matters of state. And so I'm going to read a quote from Koyami here, but it makes reference to an emperor Sujin. Sujin was a Japanese emperor, often known as one of these so called legends and dairy emperors. Though I've read that some think he maybe or probably did exist in history, maybe reigning during the first century BCE or sometime around then. But what we know about him is enmeshed in a lot of legends, so I think it's hard to say a lot for certain if he did exist. But anyway, the chronicle says Emperor Seugen quote had a sacred bed made so that he could dream in order to make a decision in a crisis, for example, to stamp out epidemics or to nominate the heir to the throne. He often listened to the dreams of his subjects in order to make national policy. It is clear that during this phase people still believed in the supernatural world and dreaming was considered a domain where qualified persons communicated with powerful spirits. So this mimics beliefs about dreams. We've seen from elsewhere that dreams could be used for divination, that they could help you predict the future, or they could give you advice. Maybe you would be getting advice directly from some kind of spiritual entities who had privileged knowledge, and that in some cases there were specially qualified people who could communicate with these entities in dreams.
I love this detail that the emperor had a sacred dreaming bed. That's that's that's wonderful. This idea that a night's sleep needs to be special. Tonight's sleep is just about a vital dream that will help lead the way.
I think you could consider this a form of intentional dream incubation. That you know that we see this in other cultures, like in ancient Greco Roman culture, there would be temples where you could go and sleep in the temple in like a special place in order to receive a dream from the god. I guess after you made an offering to the god because you slept in the temple, the dream would be from that God giving you advice about what to do in order to solve your problem.
Yeah.
After this, Koyama goes to Phase three, which is beginning in the fifth century and going into the ninth. This was a time when Japan was established as a state and interacted politically with other states in East Asia koamas As. There were strong Chinese influences in Japan at this time, including Chinese law codes, as well as the spread of philosophies and religions that were either Chinese in origin or popular in China already, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Now, as we've discussed before, I think this came up in talking about that book by Lynn Struve. Confucianism sometimes is taken to militate against supernatural or so called irrational interpretations of dreams. I've read elsewhere. I think that that Confucian thinkers were sort of often not on board with the idea of dream divination, while Taoism, on the other hand, does sort of allow for fortune telling and omens.
Yeah, that's my understanding that sort of three different schools here are in play, but those are sort of the the major like push and pull between Confusism and Dallism concerning dreams.
From this period, Koyama mentions a Buddhist temple coming back to the special dream bed, mentions a Buddhist temple called the Horyuji, which was built in the early seventh century by a prince named Shotoku, and allegedly the prince would lock himself inside this temple for days at a time to receive inspiration, and one of the names of this building translates to dream hall. However, Koyama says that during this period, the primary thing about dreams is that they seem mostly kept private, maybe whether one believed in dreams as divination or not.
Okay, so there wasn't as much in the way of dream literature at the time.
But then we reach phase four, and it's when we realize we are all just the dream of a giant ant mound no sorry movie reference. Beginning in the ninth century going on until the thirteenth there is this period Koyama characterizes as the maturation of the political and economic structure of Japan and the establishment of a court culture that includes literature and other elite products. During this period, there is a resurgence of interest in dreams as a tool for seeing into the future. During this period, there is a resurgence of interest in dreams as a tool for seeing into the future. This comes in concert with what seems to be a general resurgence of belief in, or at least interest in supernatural beings and mechanisms like ghosts, demons, wraiths, omens, and curses. And during this period Japanese Buddhism Koamas has incorporated some Shinto elements, Shinto being sort of the native belief system of Japan. Again to the special dream facilities and dream beds, Quoyama writes, quote, some temples and shrines had special compounds for dreaming. People rushed to such places en mass and stayed until they had a good dream. There were professional dream interpreters and dreamers by profession. Nightmares and sleep disorders were commonplace during this period. However, it's important to consider none of these generalizations totalizing, because there are some counterexamples, like Koyama mentions a tenth century poetic diary known as the Kageroniki, sometimes called The Gossamer Years in English, in which the author at one point gets a supernatural interpretation of a dream from a priest, and she calls the priest's interpretation of the dream a stupid lie, but the priest did try to give her the interpretation, so it seems maybe that's normal for this period, but the author's reaction suggests diversity of opinion on the power of dreams among the elite. But overall, if Koyama is correct, this is a period where belief in the power of dreams flowers. Then there's phase five beginning in the thirteenth century, the rise of the samurai class, and it's a sonociated power system. Koyama describes them as, for the most part, realistic and practical entrepreneurs coyamas as literature of this time period shows on average a sort of turning away from belief in the power of dreams as supernatural portents or realities, at least certainly not as much as there was in the phase before. And one example Koyama gives is a Japanese epic known as the tai Haiki, or the Chronicle of Great Peace. This is written sometime in the late fourteenth century, and in part of this text there is a warrior named Ayoto who quote refused to receive an award after being told that his lord wanted to give it because he dreamt of Aoto's distinguished service. He said, I can't receive such an irrational award. I did nothing. What will happen if he dreams another way? And then Coyamas as quote for such people, the difference between dream and reality was clearly distinct. And then finally Phase six coam this is the nineteenth century onward. One of the main changes is the influence of Euro American culture, and Coyama says that on one hand, modern Japanese culture has a predominantly rationalist and materialist view of nature, which relegates streams to natural psychological phenomena with no predictive power or reality of their own. On the other hand, he says, millions still visit Shinto shrines and keep good luck charms in their cars and so forth, and so in some ways, elements of what the author refers to as animistic thinking, which again seems to mean in this paper, the belief in a spiritual dimension of reality that operates outside of strict physical causality, can still be found peaking out through the top layer of rationalism. Maybe people kind of shift back and forth between these ways of seeing the world depending on how they feel, though I would say I don't think this would be at all unique to Japan. It just seems to me this is sort of what most people in all societies do.
Oh absolutely, I feel like this comes up time and time again, whether we're talking about say, you know, varying at times contradictory beliefs about the afterlife and how you know, you may think one way in the morning, one way in the afternoon, or kind of two ways at once without really putting a fine line on it. Likewise, I remember when we looked at some research concerning belief in modern China in the power of the zodiac concerning when a child is born, and you know, as I remember, part of that was it was not that you had a large number of contemporary people who were super invested in this, like the zodiac system and that belief system, but they were just a little bit aware of it. It's kind of like background superstitious belief that you may dip into at times when it seems useful.
When it feels right, suddenly you'll play on that board. But right maybe most the time you're not looking at it, yeah yeah.
Or you have a decision to make and you know, you don't have any other factors to go on but you do have this bit of you know, traditional lore that is a steeped in superstition. You might turn to that in those circumstances. And I think this also extends to the use of amulets and you know, good luck tokens and so forth, you know, because it's like, you may not believe it completely, but hey, it doesn't take a much room in the pocket or on the dash of the car or what have you.
A person might say, I don't really believe it, but it's kind of fun. But then once you have it, you can kind of, I don't know, find yourself in moments clutching at it. Yes, But you know, an interesting thing that I think came up in part three of the series is that whether you have a totally rationalistic approach to dreams, you don't really, you know, give them any any special power. You don't think they were reflect a secret reality of spiritual entities interacting or giving you information about the future how to live your life. Even then, you still don't want to have nightmares. So people are looking for ways to have good dreams, whether they think dreams are supernatural experiences or not.
Yeah, it's kind of like, all right, I wasn't listening when you were talking about what this dream and what this dream meant. But but you said something about stopping nightmares. So let's get back to that, and that's ultimately where we come to in discussing the monster. At long last, we're going to be talking about the Baku. Now. I encourage everyone to look up some illustrations of the Baku, certainly the historical illustrations, but I also ran across a number of like contemporary, you know, fan illustrations and so forth, online illustrations, and many of those are also very impressive. I found two major trends in the way that this creature is depicted. One is kind of like the frightening Avenger of Nightmares version of the Baku, and the other is kind of like the I guess, the awe buddy version of the Baku, where he just looks looks snugly.
The funny thing about the I totally agree, yeah you have the scary Baku or the snugly Baku, is that they both look very huggable, and somehow the scary Baku is even more huggable than.
The two one. Yeah, yeah, I agree, yeah, I mean, and yeah, no matter what, there may be some some snuggling involved at the end of it. So the Baku, I guess just a good place to start is with sort of like general descriptions. I always go to Carol Roses encyclopedias of monsters and fairies and so forth is a good like sort of starting place. And in that Rose describes the Baku as a benevolent, semi supernatural monster with an appearance that is basically that of a giant taper, but a creature that is also described as having the body of a horse, the head of a lion, and the legs and of a tiger. Note if you haven't seen an actual taper, a taper is of course a natural world organism. It does not look quite like this, though it does look very unique. It is a notable creature. I find that when I see one in a movie or at a zoo or illustrations online, I can't help but feel elated from having seen it.
To me, a taper or tapier, however, you say it is the three way cross between a pig, a panda, bear, and an elephant.
Yeah, I guess it depends where your starting point is, but yeah, taper definitely feels more pig like, yeah, pig and rhino based than anything more in the taper here in a bit, but the baccu. The idea is that humans may call on it in the early morning hours to devour a bad dream or nightmare that has plagued their dream space, allowing them to forget and carry on their day in peace, which is a worthy duty. And I also find it interesting that, you know, this kind of lines up with the way that that dreams and especially bad dreams and nightmares kind of hit it. So there's kind of like that period where we can easily forget or easily remember. Like part of the principle of dream journaling is, oh, you've got to write it down before you forget it, And with nightmare sometimes that the challenge is reversed. You've got to you've got to not think about it before you remember it. You've got to forget it before it sticks with you too long.
That's a good point. Yes, if it was really scary, you'll be thinking about it continuously after you wake up, which actually cements it in memory.
Yeah, and then there's something about writing it down or telling somebody about the dream that certainly brings out the details. Sometimes those details that aren't sticking with you, and then you start telling someone about the dream or nightmare and more that comes to you. Now as a side here I was. I found it more than a little shocking that the Baku is not listed in Borges The Book of Imaginary Beings, which is another book I like to refer to time and time again on the show, especially given the author's interest in dreams and his reference to various dream creatures in the book, like there are entries for like here's a creature that C. S. Lewis once dreamed about, that sort of thing. I suppose he just simply hadn't cross paths with mention of the Baku, otherwise he would have been all over it. Or perhaps he's just not included there, and he's there's some poem or short story I haven't read by by Borges that refers to the Baku.
So I was reading about the Baku in an excellent book on my shelf on Japanese monsters called The Book of Yokai, which is by an Indiana University folklore scholar named Michael Dylan Foster. I've mentioned this book on the show before. So according to Foster, the baku is a is a friendly yokaia a benevolent yokai. Many yokaia are not so friendly, but this one is thought to have the power to eat nightmares, but it was not always understood this way. Stories of this creature originated in China, going at least as far back as a poetry collection from the year eight thirty four by the Tang dynasty poet by Juye, who lived seven seventy two to eight forty six. And according to this text, the baku has nose of an elephant, eyes of a rhinoceros, tail of an ox, and legs of a tiger.
It would not be incorrect to say that this monster kind of looks like Snuffleopagus, the imaginary friend of Big Bird from Sesame Street.
That's right. But Rob, if you were having nightmares, would you consider a possible remedy of this being to skin snuffle Upagus. This text says, if you lay out the skin when you sleep, you can avoid epidemics, and by drawing an image of the baku you can avoid misfortune. People with chronic headaches can protect their heads by using a screen with an image of the baku when they go to sleep. So in this ninth century Chinese text, the baku is not yet an eater of bad dreams, but I think you can kind of see how you would get there. So its skin or its image offers general protection from sickness, from bad fortune, and from headaches or chronic pain. However, the protection is enacted by placing either a piece of or an image of the baku around you while you sleep, So sleep is originally part of the protective mechanism, not the thing that is being protected, though again you can imagine how that transition would occur. By the Edo period in the beginning of the seventeenth century, the baku had come to be seen in Japan as an eater of nightmares, protecting the week when they were in the vulnerable position of sleep, and this usually worked by placing a picture of the baku near the pillow, or sometimes people just had a baku shaped pillow. Now you're talking, Do you have a baku pillow?
No? But I love the idea of it.
Yeah, get one. This would allow you to literally hug the baku, Foster says. In a text called the Three Realms, there is reference to the baku which includes the details that the baku has really strong bones and teeth and it's quote it's urine can melt iron and turn it into water. What what is that used for? Enemy of magneto?
I mean, I guess a lot of this comes down to, like the fact that we'll come back to it later on, is that you know, there is a tradition in multiple cultures. Really that's it's not only what the animal is, but what can the animal be used for? What are it's various medicinal properties, et cetera. And sometimes this can skew, This can skew into areas that are maybe a little less realistic and more based in magic or some sort of or maybe something that doesn't translate as well across the centuries.
Yeah, now there are I know you're going to get into this in a minute, so I guess we mostly save it for there. But Foster raises the question about whether the Baku of folklore is based on the taper or not. Basically, there is some question about whether it is or not. Some scholars say yes, some say no. Yeah.
The thing that that's notable about the taper is, of course that there are are four species of taper in the world today.
Uh.
Three of them are native to Central and South America, and then you have the Malayan taper, which is found in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand.
Notably none of those places are Japan, right, so.
There would there would have to be some degree of this game of telephone concerning the form, function, and likeness of of the particular animal in question, as you see with other animals where we've we've talked about in the show plenty of times before and we will continue to do so. I mean, it's one of the most fascinating things in the history of naturalistic art and imaginative art, you know, taking this form and then seeing what happens to it when you start talking about it and then depict it, you know, not even halfway around the world, but just you know, a good distance away from it.
Yes, and this feeds into one of the final observations that Foster makes, which I think is very interesting. So Foster again makes reference to the fact that the baku is described as having like, you know, legs of a tiger tail of an ox, so it is a hybrid of many different animal parts, and Foster says this is typical of how lots of yokai are described, and in a way This allows them to exist in between the realms of real and imaginary, because all of the parts are real, but their combination is imaginary. But there's another interesting wrinkle here when it comes to pre modern Japan. Foster writes quote to people living in Japan during the Edo period or earlier, the very parts from which the creature was constructed were as strange and foreign as their unnatural combination. Elephants, rhinoceroses, and tigers were not native to Japan. Average Japanese person during this time would have seen one only in illustrations and books, if at all, the same places that might also have images of the baku. That is, a baku was presumably no more mysterious and also no less real than a rhinoceros. So it's an unreal combination of real animal parts. But most of those real animal parts are from animals that you never would have seen in person.
Wow Wow, interesting. Now I found an interesting paper about the baku or concerns the Baku that I'm going to draw some info here from. A titled Cultural Note on Dreaming and dream Study in the future. Release from Nightmare and Development of Dream Control Technique by Today Ohri published in Sleep and biological rhythms in two thousand and five. Now, the author here points out something that they're pretty standar we've already touched on this already, that you know, nightmares can be quite unpleasant. Obviously, they can disrupt your sleep, and since they disrupted your sleep, they can disrupt your waking life as well, both as a result of lost sleep and the emotional and cognitive after effects of the nature of nightmares, without even getting into again the more extreme cases of parasomnia and night terrors and so forth. Additionally, as Horry points out here, stress and trauma in the waking world can only intensify bad dreams and nightmares. So you know, there are a lot of reasons for the content of your dreams, the contents of your nightmares, and just nightmares in general to be just this added thing that you would like very much to have removed. And if given the choice, obviously, if we were to choose between good dreams and bad dreams each night, we would choose the good dreams. But Horry writes that in the ethnic groups and cultures examined in their research anyway, there aren't really any person gribed methods to have a good dream. Rather there are various rights in formulas to eliminate nightmares or minimize their impact. I found that an interesting idea, like it did remind me of something from my own childhood, but I don't remember if it was something that I saw on a TV show. I think it might have been, or to what degree it was something that one of my parents introduced to me. But there was this idea of an imaginary dream machine that before you go to bed, you like, you know, you think about this dream helmet or whatever that you're putting on or some sort of machine you're augmenting, and you tell it what you want to dream that night, like you put in your order. Which is a great idea, and you know, to some degree if it actually worked to any degree, And I remember, even as a kid, I found that it did not. It had no impact on what I was going to dream, and therefore I didn't stick with it because it obviously didn't work. Like it you learn really quickly that dreams are just going to do their own thing. And for that reason, I don't think I ever really introduced it to my own son, because I'm like, I'm not going to tell you this. This doesn't work at.
All, I wonder if the effectiveness of it would be kind of similar to what people do when they're trying to practice lucid dreaming, where, for example, one thing people do is like constantly making a habit of asking yourself if you're dreaming right now, so that the habit will resurface when you are dreaming. I wonder if that kind of thing, Like, so, if you do the dream machine often enough, it will maybe cause it to buy habit come to mind during a dream and then you can remember, hey, wait a minute, I was supposed to be programming this.
Yeah, so I guess it could work if you were the sort of kid that really stuck with it, you know. But I guess I was the kind where there were no immediate results and therefore I abandon it.
Good job quitting, I want.
Like I say, I feel that same way with lucid dreaming. Like at times like this, I'm like, why haven't I applied myself to lucid dreaming? Why am I dreams so so so non lucid? But I don't know. There's just there's enough to worry about without without really getting in on the dreams.
You've got a waking life to live, so.
Hoy divides this sort of nightmare inhibition into in technique into two categories. Amulets are charms to eliminate nightmares, and then development of techniques to take control of a dream and push it in a positive direction. So a lucid dreaming approach to nightmares. And maybe that's the thing too, Like maybe if I, if I on the whole suffered from more nightmares or stress dreams or what have you, I would be more inclined to pursue lucid dreaming as an escape m okay so. On the first note amulets, Hori discusses two main varieties that are popular in contemporary Japan, and that is the baku, but then also the dream catcher. This I was not expecting. The DreamCatcher is of course not a Japanese cultural creation, but rather one that originates with the indigenous First Nations people of North America, particularly parts of what is now Canada. The Ojibwa people are often cited, though I think usage in production spreads with sort of the Pan Indian movement of the sixties and seventies. The basic principle of the DreamCatcher is that the night air brings both good and bad dreams, and the DreamCatcher, like a spider's web, catches the bad and allows the good to prosper in the sleeper's mind. Now, I believe that the main usage was intended for infants. But now in America dreamcatchers, you know, they're quite popular as a native craft item. This happened, I think, originally in the nineteen eighties and spread from there, but Hore writes that they became exceedingly popular in Japan following a popular year two thousand TV mini series. I believe it's kind of like a melodrama or romance sort of thing, Beautiful Life. Now, I was not familiar with this of This is not like a genre of Japanese pop culture that I generally have any exposure to. You know, this is not a monster movie or horror movie, sci fi, et cetera. This is a broad appeal like big you know, TV production. I looked it up though, and I saw that it starred Takua Kimura. He's the actor who voiced Howel in the original Japanese language version of Howe's Moving Castle. I looked at like some write ups of what the plot is about, I saw nobody mentioned exactly where these dream Catchers are used if they factor into the plot at all, or if they're just you know, in the background. But whatever, it was really popular show and people saw it and they're like, we want in on that, and dream catchers became popular, though according to Hordri, it ended up focusing more on young people rather than babies. Now, the baku, on the other hand, as we've been discussing, is largely rooted in Japanese traditions, and I guess to a certain extent, kind of paves the way for this fascination with dream catchers. Like there's already a you know, an appeal for some sort of an amulet too to discourage nightmares and therefore encourage positive dreams, and so when one is introduced from another culture, you can see why people might gravitate towards it. Now, as we've been discussing, primarily it's impossible to escape the taper when it comes to understanding what the baku is like. By most accounts, like this sounds like a taper. We see depictions of it. It looks mostly like some you know, exaggeration or telephone game of the taper. But you also find discussions on the possibility that it might have originally, and it's Chinese origins, which you already alluded to here, it might have originally been something like a giant panda. Now Hori does not himself, does not really go into this, but but notes that the baku was of course a charm animal in China, going back to you know, seventeenth century writings, and perhaps it is already sometimes depicted as a paper here, though it may not have actually been associated with dream eating. Like we said, you get back into the origins of the baku and you get further away from the idea of consuming nightmares.
Yeah, that seems to be a later development.
Now, an interesting note though about the panda here. At this point I looked at a book by Burned Brunner titled Bears a Brief History, and the author here points out that despite the fact that the panda now stands as kind of a quintessential Shinese animal, you know, we think about it as such in modern times, there are few ancient writings about them, and the writings that may be about them are difficult to nail down because of just how vague they are. An early possible account from the Chin Dynasty third century BCE might be about a white fox, or some people think, well, maybe it's a panda. There's an even older mention that could allude to a panda, but also could be a leopard or a so it gets again exceptionally vague and therefore difficult to say whether we're actually talking about a panda or not. For instance, there are discussions later on in Chinese writings about white bears, but it seems as likely, if not more likely, that they're actually talking about polar bears encountered by northern travelers and word having spread about them. And then there are additional possibilities that there are other bears, like from India that are being written about. So it's interesting to consider that the panda is also underrepresented in traditional Chinese medicine compared to other animals, again getting back to like, okay, what is the animal and then what can be broken down about it to benefit humans. Some have interpreted this fact as being due to the animal having a sacred status, but the author in this case questions that, pointing out that well, you know, it really did not have a role in Chinese lore to suggest sacred production, like it's you know, it seems to be barely mentioned and if it is mentioned, it's mentioned only vaguely, So that's interesting. I feel like I need to look into that more in the future. So it seems like, based on what I've been reading that the idea that the baku might have originally been a panda possible, But it doesn't seem extremely like. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of like firm evidence for that. Okay, but according I believe according to horri here though, there you know, as it undergoes exaggeration and transfer into Japanese usage, the proper baku, you know that the nose of the what is probably a taper becomes an elephant, the eyes become those of a rhino, the tail of a cow, legs of a tiger, hair of a lion. It gets spots whereas it didn't have spots before. And the creature's diet is said to consist of strange things like iron and copper and sometimes bamboo, which certainly, you know, made me think again about the panda. But I don't know, it does seem like strong enough evidence to really start forcing the panda into the conversation more than's necessary.
This doesn't really have any relation to the baku. But I just have to say, on a recent trip to the zoo where we were watching the Atlanta Zoo, where we were watching the panda enclosure, we saw the feeding happen where they were throwing new branches of bamboo down to the pandas so they could eat them, and one of the pandas literally just collapsed into a pile of bamboo branches or unleashing a mighty crashing sound. If it's literally just like rolling in its food, very fun. They love it.
I guess one of the reasons I keep wanting to think about the panda in this role is that you can imagine the image, especially our modern understanding of the panda, lines up with the way we may think about the taper, and you can imagine a panda having this kind of status and roll in one superstitious understanding of dreams. But I don't know how that really would rack up and compare with historic understandings of pandas in China, especially considering wild pandas, But hard to say for sure. So Horri writes that we don't know when the baku ultimately crosses the sea into Japanese traditions, but that screen illustrations from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries depict the creature. It becomes very popular with the common people during the Edope era, I believe, as you alluded to earlier. Horry points out that during the seventh through eighth centuries, a sacred animal called the hockey was associated with nightmare consumption, and that you still see some of this reflected. This was originally an imperial court practice, but you see some of it reflected in the setsubun ceremony that still practice today. We discussed this in our bean episode about like pelting one or demons with beans in order to drive them out of say a school or what have you. The baku, however, seems to sort of take on this sacred role and replaces the hockey when it enters Japanese traditions. So this seems like a possible way of looking at the evolution of this monster. Like you already have perhaps a role for some sort of dream eating creature, even if it's not fully developed, and then here comes this new sort of sacred creature that is associated with protective qualities, and maybe these two kind of get wrapped into one. You know, this is a common thing you see with traditions of magical creatures, you know, they don't they're morphous. Over time, they change shapes, they converge with other creatures, and sometimes they separate as well.
At the danger of steamrolling over nuance and how folklore evolves, I really do wonder if the fact that the baku is cute played a role in it's uh in a role and it's evolving to fill this niche of protecting children's dreams.
Yeah, I mean, there's a there's certainly a larger discussion to be had there concerning not only the universal appeal of cute, but also obviously cute has a tremendous history in Japanese culture as well. So already shares that old baku amulets show things like a ship filled with rice or just characters representing baku. And this was from when it was a higher class affair for the emperor in his circle, and a ritual of sleeping with it on or under your pillow, and this was something that would be carried out once a year to clear out the past year's bad dreams, which I thought was interesting. It wasn't necessarily a situation of like I had a bad dream, I need to fix this, or I might have a bad dream tonight I need to fix it. It's more like market on the calendar. It's time to clear out all those bad dreams. All the past year's bad dreams are gone.
It's like a nightmare leaves a stench that's sort of hanging in the air, and you bring in the Baku to like waft it all out.
Yeah, the boat that is depicted on these ambulance apparently the ideas the boat becomes loaded with these bad dreams again that have been accumulated over the course of a year whole you know, boatload of them literally or symbolically. It tends how you look at it. I guess anyway, they're loaded up on this boat, and then the boat goes out, sails out into the waters of purification. That's essentially dumping them.
I guess.
You know. As time goes by, these depictions show more treasure aboard the Baku ship, and in time, you know, the common people adopted ritual as well. Hoy writes that it eventually loses the association with nightmare purification to a large degree and becomes kind of more of a mascot of happiness and kind of a good luck token as well. So it's interesting how you know, we see the just as we see the rise and fall of dream emphasis within a given culture, you could also see that associated with particular practices, amulets and mythical creatures. By the way, in this paper there there's at least one really interesting thing that Horry brings up that's not Baku related at all, concerning dreaming manipulation superstitions in Japan. But they do mention that there is this pre modern practice where it is said that if you want to see your loved ones in your dreams, and I think this may relate more to loved ones who are deceased, you could wear your clothing inside out when you go to sleep, and that would help manipulate the nature of your dreams.
Any insight into the magical logic there.
It reminds me of things in general that we've touched on. It reminds me of things in Russian folklore that we've talked about before, you know, the idea of wearing clothes backwards or doing something interesting with the buttons, Like there's something about manipulating the order of things in the waking world that can then have some sort of a relationship on the supernatural world or in this case dreams.
Wasn't it that by wearing clothes backward in the Russian folklore you would like defend yourself against ghosts or monsters or something.
Yeah, or it concerned what was their name, the wild one, the man in the woods?
Oh, the leshie.
Yeah, I believe it came up in the leshie.
That would lower people off the path.
Yeah, yeah, I think it's come up elsewhere as well, maybe in I want to say, Irish folklore and superstition. You know, I think it's a motif you see pop up here and there, you know, this idea that there if something's out of line with your clothing, there's some potential slip into the other world.
I guess.
One of the interesting things about this to me is that it's not just necessarily about good versus bad dreams. But in this we're getting in the depiction into the distinction between dreams that are just you know, clutter, you know that that you don't want, and having a dream that has some connection to a realm beyond the waking world in this case, like the realm of the dead, the realm of past lives, and so forth.
Yeah, that's interesting. So I could see like wearing your clothes inside out might somehow grant you access, but that does seems somehow different because again, if well maybe I'm not even remembering this right, but if I am remembering it right, with the Russian thing, it was like that wearing the closed backwards would somehow protect you. That's almost like that would keep you more grounded to reality or maybe prevent these creatures from recognizing you or something. I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, like somehow messes with how this world interacts or touches with the other world or creatures of that other world. So we've covered some key dream cultures here from particular periods in these episodes, but there's so much we didn't get into. Like you just in passing horror mentions that there's a strong Malaysian tradition of dream control, and I didn't have time to follow up on that and see what that might consist of. But it would be interesting to hear from listeners out there if you know of any other great examples of some sort of robust or even just very slight seeming method of changing or altering or controlling the flow of dream, be it related to an amulet or a childhood you know, nursery, rhyme or story. We'd be very interested to hear about that totally.
Does your culture have something like a baku you want to tell us about.
Or do you have just additional tales of the baku?
Did you have a baku pillow?
I did a quick search for baku pillows and I could not find one that is shaped like a baku. But I did see one on a popular online retailer that it does have a depiction of a baku on it, and it looks very nice. But of course we know that. You know, I feel like you would also have to be really comfortable for my purposes, like I need a very specific pillow if I'm going to have if I'm hoping to have decent dreams.
I don't think I ever had a pillow with representative art on it. I think I've had boring pillows my whole life. Never had like a spider Man pillow or anything.
I never did. But my son has gone to I don't know, at school or camps, they sometimes make pillow cases. So he had one that was decorated with with pokemon not too long ago that he'd made himself, so you know, you can always make your own baku pillow for sure.
Do the Pokemon protect him from bad dreams?
I don't know. Maybe, I mean one does wonder at times if you're if you're obsessing about something and you have that kind of like childhood obsession level for it, if you can control the nature of your dreams in that way. Because my son is always talking about how like he's obsessed with them with Zelda right now, and so he'll he'll have dreams about playing Zelda and about or about the world of Zelda, which is great. And at times I'm like, I was, like, I wonder, like what some of the differences are between the adult mind and the childhood mind, because there are plenty of things that I get obsessed about that are, you know, a wonderful distraction from the real world, but I end up not dreaming about them, or at least I don't remember those dreams. I have dreams about other things that don't make any sense, or things that aren't like key to to you know, central to my interests or even my my anxieties, at least not on a you know, on a really obvious level.
Ye know, I'm gonna say, my gut instinct about this. So I'm not speaking for any science I've read or anything, but my suspicion is that you are much more likely to dream about an obsession if that obsession has a spatial component. So video games are very much something you could dream about because they, I mean typically they have a simulated environment with spatial dimensions that you explore. Similarly, I think people have a lot of dreams when they're obsessed with, like houses or something like that. That kind of content seems especially prone to turning up in the dream world.
But then like movies we watch for the podcast, subjects we research for the podcast nothing.
Yeah, I don't know if those have as much of a spatial component. I mean, like a movie is shot within spaces, but you don't really imagine inhabiting those spaces moving through them.
Interesting. Well, you know, I'd love to hear what everyone else has to say about this. You know, we all have different sorts of dreams. Are they're different? It's kind of a question, b is you know, are there particular things you do in the real world or obsess about in the real world that seem to have more of a guaranteed connection to the subject matter of your dreams?
Yeah, how's my spatial hypothesis? Hold up? Blasted out of the water.
Come on, all right, we're going to go and close it out there, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind publish in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but we also do a listener mail episode on Mondays, so write in. That's where we'll discuss those messages. On Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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