The Baku And Japanese Dream Folklore

Japanese folklore includes a figure whose function is to eat bad dreams. Around it sits a broader body of practice concerned with obtaining good dreams and disposing of bad ones.

The creature and its origins

The baku is described as a composite animal assembled from parts of several others, and is said to consume nightmares when called upon by a frightened sleeper.

The figure entered Japan from Chinese tradition, where a comparable creature appears earlier, and was adapted within Japanese folklore over subsequent centuries.

Its depiction shifted over time, and in later periods it became associated with the tapir, which now shares the same name in Japanese.

How it was invoked

Practice included calling on the creature after a bad dream, asking it to take the dream away, sometimes repeated a set number of times.

Images of the baku were placed near sleeping areas or incorporated into bedding and headrests, functioning as protection in the way apotropaic images generally do.

The consistent feature is that the nightmare is treated as an object that can be removed rather than as an experience that must simply be endured.

The first dream of the year

A separate and well-documented custom concerns the first dream of the new year, which was held to indicate the fortune of the year ahead.

A traditional ranking of auspicious content circulated widely, placing a particular mountain first, followed by a hawk and an aubergine, an ordering whose origin is debated.

People took active steps to secure a good dream, including placing pictures of treasure ships beneath the pillow, sometimes with a palindromic verse written on them.

Disposing of an inauspicious dream

Where the first dream proved unfavourable, procedures existed for cancelling it, including floating the picture away on water the following morning.

This combination of invitation and disposal is a coherent system. A dream that carries fortune can be sought, and if the wrong one arrives it can be discarded.

The underlying logic treats the dream as something with a material aspect, which is why physical procedures are appropriate responses to it.

Dreams in the wider literary tradition

Classical Japanese literature makes extensive use of dreams, including the convention that dreaming of someone indicated that person was thinking of the dreamer.

Buddhist influence added a further layer, with dreaming used as an illustration of the insubstantiality of ordinary experience, a theme that recurs throughout the poetry.

These strands, folk practice, court literature and Buddhist reflection, developed alongside each other, and the resulting tradition draws on all three rather than any one.