元稹の夢についての考察

Abstract

Yuan Shen 元稹 (779-831) was a great mid-T'ang poet who is often cited along with Pai Chu-i 白居易. Although many of his poems are descriptions of the content of his dreams, he does not reflect the archaic approach that considers dreams as premonitions and believes in the concordance between dreams and reality. Moreover rather than creating a poem by abstractly inserting his emotions on awakening, Yuan plainly describes his dreams-they are primarily dreams of sorrow-as his actual experiences. Especially in his long poems he focuses his attention on the content of the dreams themselves, with no element of striving for effect. He does not ask too much of his dreams, nor does he distrust them, but simply describes his dreams with the passage of time. In this way the minute descriptions of the details of dreams make it possible, by creating and rerealizing a complete world, to clarify the consciousness of those objects dreamed and to have deep insights into reality. This method shares certain aspects with the treatment of dreams in the ch'uan-ch'i 傳奇 novels that were popular in the mid-T'ang, and it is possible to think that he was influenced by them. But for Yuan Shen a dream is not a means of forgetting troubles and avoiding reality, and his attitude toward the creation of a poem is always realistic and intimately connected to daily life. Apart from this, however, there are cases where a dream is used in order to exaggerate and beautify a sweetly beautiful world. But even here Yuan's basic attitude toward dreams remains the same: that is, the realization that a dream disappears all makes the contrast with the time after awakening distinct. And he is aware also that describing a dream goes beyond one's own experience to the broader level that includes readers as well, and that a dream has its own life in and of itself. Generally speaking, however, it is difficult to detect a concentrated image in the word dream in the works of Yuan Shen. We must wait for later poets to impart colorful images and depth to dreams. But it is fair to say that during the mid-T'ang when general interest in prose became widespread and the ch'uan-ch'i novels that were often based on dreams popular, it was Yuan Shen, creating many poems with the description of his dreams, who cultivated the trend of introducing dreams as the subject matter of poems.