Amazing Chinese Characters (151) Dream - 梦

The shell bone script of the character Dream is

the right is Bed, and the left is a person, a person is sleeping on a bed.

As I mentioned in other posts, the original characters were written in bamboo slips, which were very narrow, so people wrote or drew characters in vertical. This character is a vertical drawing of sleeping.

Let's turn it 90 degree

 Here we can see a person sleeping on a bed.

Dream occurs in sleeping.

Its big seal script is

which changed a lot. We can see the big eye, and eyebrow, similar to character Eyebrow below

under the eye, something like 八 is the body of the person. 

The bottom part

means Evening when dream happens in sleeping, which is extra part without in shell bone script, but there is no bed anymore.

Its small seal script is

which is similar to big seal script, but the top one is more like a bed than its big seal script.

Its clerical script is

The song typeface for traditional character is

夢

which is similar to the clerical script.

The song typeface for simplified character is

梦

The bottom is same to the traditional character, but the top one become 林，which means Forest, nothing to do with Dream. The reason why the Eyebrow is changed to Forest may be because people might have misunderstood the top is a grass head (草字头), not the eyebrow. 

Its Pinyin is Meng4.