0049 夢

夢

This character means ‘dream.’ It’s pronounced MU or yume in Japanese and mèng in Chinese.

The top line, with two vertical hatches, represents eyebrows, and the horizontal three-part bar below the eyebrows is an eye, which stands in here for a sleeping man. He’s lying on a horizontal bar—a bed—and below that is a crescent moon. The meaning is ‘dream.’

The eyebrows are clearer in the archaic character above, where they are perched over a single eye.

艹

You see above the ‘grass radical.’ It seems not to be used as an independent character, but appears in many plant-related characters. However, the same symbol can have other meanings and other derivations, as in today’s kanji, where it originally showed a pair of eyebrows.

This character has a special characteristic that makes it easier to remember: it’s totally off-balance. Most characters are firmly grounded and balanced, whether on feet, on a box, a line, or one or more supports, whether symmetric or not. Firmly grounded characters would not fall over to one side. Today’s character, however, rests on one tiny point far to one side of the character’s center of mass, and it looks very unstable.