This complex example of ancient Chinese dream interpretation shows a thoughtful crime-investigator using three very different techniques: commonsense (he doubts confession during torture means much), scholarship (the suspect's strange dream has images interpretable as Yi Jing [I Ching] trigrams), and visual puns based on the characters you'd write the dream with; even my poor Chinese can follow his reasoning here.

Like any detective, he looks first to the family. And though the dreamer didn't consciously know of any link within his family to the killer, his unconscious did--and indirectly named him, in a way that'd only work in Chinese.

--Chris Wayan

WATER, HORSE, TWO SUNS

A story in The Book of Jin tells that when Fu Rong was governor [c.370-380], there was a person named Dong Feng who had returned home after three years of traveling and studying. The night of his return, Dong stayed with his wife at the home of her parents; that very night, his wife was killed. The wife's parents suspected that Dong himself had committed this crime, and had him arrested. Dong suffered so greatly from the beatings of his interrogators that he could no longer tolerate the pain, and confessed that he killed his wife.

When Fu Rong heard of this story he thought it strange and interviewed Dong. Dong told him that before he got home, he had a dream in which:

He was riding a horse and came to a river. He started to cross the river from the north bank, heading to the south, but in the middle of the river, the horse stopped. He kept whipping the horse, but the horse refused to move. He looked down and saw two suns in the water, on the left side a sun white and wet, and on the right side, a sun black and dry.

He awoke quite distraught, thinking the dream an ill omen. He went to a dream interpreter who told him that he would have an encounter with the law, and told him not to sleep on his pillow, and not to wash his hair.

When he got home, his wife warmed water for him to wash his hair and gave him a pillow. Dong remembered the interpreter's words and did not use the water or the pillow. His wife then washed her hair and went to sleep on the pillow. That was the night she was killed.

Fu Rong interpreted the dream using the eight trigrams. According to the Book of Change [Yi Jing or I Ching], water means "male" and horse means "female". The two suns in the water indicate one wife and two husbands. Since water (trigram kan) also means "law" and is on the top, and the horse (trigram li) is at the bottom according to its nature, he reasoned that Dong should live. Emperor Wen Wang of the Zhou dynasty once dreamed of the same trigram and survived imprisonment.

Fu Rong further reasoned that since the character feng is a compound of "water" on the left and "horse" on the right, and the character chang a compound with two stacked "sun" signs, the [dream was hinting that the] murderer must be someone named Feng Chang.

A person named Feng Chang was later arrested and confessed that he and Dong's wife planned to do away with her husband. He was to sneak into their bedroom and kill Dong, recognizing him in the moonlight by the fact that he was resting on a pillow with newly washed hair.

As it turned out, however, Dong heeded the warning of his dream and his wife was murdered instead.

SOURCE: The Interpretation of Dreams in Chinese Culture by Fang Jing Pei and Zhang Juwen, pp.33-4. DATE: Wikipedia's bio of Fu Rong, though it doesn't mention this case.

AFTERWORD

Three points:

1. Why does his wife wash her hair and use the pillow? It'd look suspicious if she didn't, but still--she trusts Feng Chang will recognize her even in the dark and see their plan's gone wrong. She over-estimates her lover, and it kills her.
2. The account talks as if governor Fu Rong is the wise one here; but let's be fair. Dong Feng's unconscious sensed both danger and an affair, and even who it might be; and his conscious had the wisdom to see that his troubling dream was beyond him, and needed professional interpretation.
   And that unnamed, uncredited, probably illiterate interpreter (unable to use trigrams or character-puns) got a hunch that a black thing in water yet resisting water might mean 'Stay dry, don't wash your hair'--and so saved his client's life.
3. Despite occasional pre-Freudian examples of interpretation by pun (Alexander the Great, besieging Tyre, dreamt of a satyr and his soothsayers declared Sa Tyros, "Tyre is yours"), they were marginal in the West until Ann Faraday in the mid-20th century. But Chinese dreams are full of wordplay all the way back. All those homonyms practically beg for it, and a writing system of radicals combined to make new characters create a visual-pun dimension that alphabetic systems just lack.

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