Why the Pillow? The Makuragaeshi and the Border Between Sleep and Dreams

What the makuragaeshi meddles with isn't your futon or your clothes. It's your pillow. It doesn't tickle you, and it doesn't pull off your covers; it goes out of its way to flip your pillow. That, it's said, has something to do with the special feelings people once had about pillows. This time, let's look at the makuragaeshi from one angle only: why the pillow?

More than bedding

To us, a pillow is just something that helps us sleep. But for people in the past, it seems to have carried more weight than that.

There was an old idea, it's said, that while you sleep your soul drifts a little way out of your body and wanders the world of dreams. And there's a view that the pillow was the place where the soul came and went, or even where it lived. Some people say the Japanese word for pillow, "makura," comes from "tama-kura," a "storehouse for the soul." Whether that's the true origin of the word is uncertain, but it does suggest that many people linked the pillow and the soul.

Some Japanese people may have grown up being told never to step on a pillow or stride over one. A certain respect for pillows still lingers somewhere in daily life.

The pillow as a doorway to dreams

The tie between pillows and dreams shows up in the language, too. There's the Japanese expression "to stand by someone's dream-pillow," used when a person who has died, or a god or Buddha, appears in a dream to deliver a message. The border between dream and waking, in other words, lies right around the pillow.

There's also a custom for hatsuyume, the first dream of the New Year. If you sleep with a picture of the treasure ship carrying the Seven Lucky Gods tucked under your pillow, the custom says, you'll have a lucky first dream. What you put under your pillow reaches your dreams. People in the past may have thought of the pillow as a kind of doorway into them.

Seen this way, the makuragaeshi's prank isn't just about a pillow sliding out of place. Someone has quietly tampered with the sleeper's soul-path, with the doorway to their dreams. Put like that, it's a little unsettling.

Turning the head around

Some stories say the makuragaeshi turns sleepers completely around, so that head and feet swap places. Here it helps to remember the customs about which way to lay your head.

In Japan, there's a well-known custom of laying the dead with their heads to the north. Because of that, some people avoid sleeping with their own heads to the north. The direction of the pillow was a sign separating the sleep of the living from the sleep of the dead.

To wake up and find your head pointing a different way may have been, for people long ago, far more startling than a simple prank. And in some places, a scarier version of the makuragaeshi is told: that the pillow is turned by the ghost of someone who died in that very room. That, too, seems connected somehow to these feelings.

The zashiki-warashi and the makuragaeshi

Not every makuragaeshi story is frightening, though. In Tohoku, the north of Japan's main island, the pillow-turning is sometimes blamed on the zashiki-warashi, a child-like spirit said to bring prosperity to the house it lives in. A lucky little house god playing a small trick in the middle of the night: think of it that way, and a messy pillow in the morning starts to look rather sweet.

You'll find more of the makuragaeshi's lore on its Yokaipedia page, and more about the zashiki-warashi on the zashiki-warashi's page. We also wrote about the zashiki-warashi and The Legends of Tono in this article.

If you wake up and your pillow isn't where it should be, before blaming the way you sleep, try imagining, just for a moment, a small visitor in the night.