A childless queen prays for an heir, sleeps, and wakes carrying a god. The fourth chapter of Myths & Legends of China, published in 1922, preserves the legend of Yü Huang — a name that, the record explains, means "the Jade Emperor," supreme lord of the Chinese heaven — and tells how he came to be born. In an ancient kingdom the king Ching Tê and his queen Pao Yüeh, "getting on in years," still "had no son", and Taoist priests were summoned to recite prayers with the object of "obtaining an heir to the throne".

Then the dream does the work no priest could. "During the ensuing night the Queen had a vision": the immortal Lao Chün, "riding a dragon, and carrying a male child in his arms", floated down toward her through the air. She begged him for the child, fell on her knees, and thanked him; and "On waking she found herself" enceinte — pregnant, in the record's borrowed French. "At the end of a year the Prince was born", compassionate to the poor from infancy, and in time he would abdicate his throne, turn hermit, and pass into godhood curing the sick. The whole conception has taken place inside the vision: no consort, no embrace, only a gift received in sleep and, on waking, a body already altered.

The telling is unusually complete for so strange a claim — prayer, night vision, waking pregnancy, and a year's gestation are all set down in order. What arrests me is that the dream is not a sign of a conception still to come but the conception itself; the queen crosses from barrenness to motherhood without waking between. If a god can be received in a dream and then carried in the flesh, where does the record suppose the border of sleep really lies?