Akutagawa Ryūnosuke - In Dreams

    I've heard that seeing color in dreams is a sign of exhausted nerves. Ever since I was a child, my dreams have always been rich in color, to the point where I have a hard time believing there’s such a thing as a colorless dream. The other day, I had a dream in which I ran into the poet H.K. at the seaside baths.¹ He was wearing a hat made of barley straw and a beautiful navy blue cloak. I was so struck by the blue’s intensity that I begged him to tell me the distinct name of the color.

    “This?” the poet asked casually, staring at the sand. “Why, this is the color of Sapporo.”²

    I have even heard it said that people can't smell in dreams. But I can recall a dream I had where I distinctly smelled burning rubber, or something very like it. It was sunset in the dream, and I was walking on the outskirts of a town close to a river. The horrible stinging smell was wafting off the river water. The river was full of alligators floating down the current like logs. Earlier in the dream, as I passed through the town, I remember thinking to myself, “Maybe this is the way to the Suez Canal.” (Admittedly, this is the only dream I’ve had in which my sense of smell played a central role.)

    Sometimes I even compose haiku and songs in my dreams. Nothing of lasting merit, unfortunately, but in my dreams I believe that I am composing masterpieces. Four or five days ago, in a dream, I stood on a path in the middle of a field in the countryside. Not far from me was a crowd of men and women who seemed to be from the area. The people in the center were plodding along, carrying a small shrine on their shoulders and shouting, “Heave ho! Heave ho!” 

    I was compelled to capture the scene in a haiku, and, unsurprisingly, the haiku turned out to be the best I'd ever written. I repeated it to myself over and over again, and felt myself to be a prestigious and venerable poet. Later, when I had awoken and was trying to remember the poem, I was appalled by the drivel my memory dredged up–

On tiptoes, I watch

the slow raising of a shrine. 

Translator's Notes

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1 Possibly a reference to Hakushū Kitahara, who was a very famous poet of the time period.^↩

2 Sapporo is the capital of Hokkaido Prefecture and Ishikari Subprefecture.^↩