“Do androids dream of electric sheep?” famously asked science fiction writer Philip K Dick, obliquely hinting at a universal—and longstanding—human obsession with dreams and our relationship with them. Robert Ford Campany, in his The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE-800 CE, approaches the subject of dreams—as do many other people—in terms of personal psychology. It is difficult to overstate how influential Freud and Jung have been in framing our modern understanding of dreams as expressions of our anxieties, fixations and unconscious drives.
Challenged at a conference about the possibility of standing outside one’s own preconceived notions on the subject, Campany was asked, “Can such a book be translated into Chinese?” He says of this question, “The point, as I understood it, was either that my paper was too enmeshed in Western categories and terminology to even be translated intelligibly, or that if it were translated it would have lost its point”. Responding to such concerns, he presents his book as a record of the process of his trying to understand the ancient texts. These sources include Shang dynasty oracle bone records of divinations, dream manuals from recovered ancient bamboo and wood slips dating from the Qin Dynasty (221 to 206 BCE), liturgical instructions found in texts, such as The Liezi and The Zhuangzi; as well as anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions found in poetry and history compilations.
In scouring texts far and wide, he identifies five basic paradigms: 1) the exorcism paradigm, which views dreams as assaults by outside entities and such dreams are often is followed by a ritual action in response to both drive off the entity and to try and ensure it won’t return; 2) the prospective paradigm, which views the dream as a kind of coded message and involves interpretation; 3) the visitation paradigm, which sees dreams as face-to-face encounters with other beings, often involving a message or the transfer of a gift; 4) the diagnostic paradigm, which often requires interpretation and is involving an issue relating to the dreamer; and 5) the spillover paradigm, which is understood in terms of the dreamer’s self-cultivation practices in waking life. This last category is concerned primarily with Buddhist, Daoist or Confucian disciplines of self-cultivation in late classical and medieval China.
Campany’s approach brings to mind Evan Thompson’s 2014 volume Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, which aims to analyze dreaming through the lens of the Indian Yogic traditions. Similar to Campany, Thompson tries to uncover different understandings of the self through the lens of dreaming. Both Thompson and Campany, in doing a deep dive into these ancient textual traditions concerning dreams — specifically the Upanishads for Thompson and the rich record of ancient divination and other records from classical and medieval China for Campany—are resisting the view that dreams are meaningless hallucinations of the brain. In the Buddhist tradition, for example, lucid dreaming is considered a trainable skill essential to the aspirant’s progress as a meditational adept: Thomspon writes that “Dream yoga tries to show us how the waking world isn’t outside and separate from our minds; it’s brought forth and enacted through our imaginative perception of it”. And Campany similarly analyzes dream manuals utilized for Buddhist practitioners in China, showing the way certain symbols reflected the dreamer’s status on their path toward liberation.
The ancient Chinese view, explains Campany, “presumes a self that is dividual, multipartite, and fissiparous.” This includes Daoist notions of multiple cloud-souls (魂) and white-souls 魄). A person is a multitude of souls that are capable of wandering outside the dreamer’s body during sleep. In this way, the dreamer is seen, less the maker of the dream, as the passive subject, witness, or even victim of the dream. In the texts this is borne out with dreams describes as being “the caused by x”. For example rather than “the king dreamed, “ the construction will appear as “the king’s dream caused by x” (王 夢 不 隹 大甲) Dreams, then, are not things that happen when the self retreats from the world into an idiosyncratic solipsistic cocoon, but rather dreams are seen as relational and inter-subjective.
In the chapter on Visitations, Campany examines ways that dreams serve as portals linking the dreamer to other beings; for rather than the modern understanding which see dreams in terms of first-person narratives, Campany uncovers a relational connection whereby the point of view of other souls, including non-human persons, such as ants or fox spirits, is present. The German term umwelt, meaning the world as perceived by a particular organism, is used to great effect in Campany’s analysis; for one characteristic he uncovers in the classical and medieval records and manuals is dreams described in terms of interconnected umwelten. For example, he describes a dream record that has an ant—with its own projects and perspectives— appearings as a co-protagonist in the dream narrative.
Campany is Professor of Asian Studies and Religion at Vanderbilt University; while the book is written for an academic audience, the writing is wonderfully engaging. In the end, it challenges us to revisit our assumptions about dreams: what can and cannot be known about them and how much is a product of cultural context. One of the book’s epigrams comes from Robinson and Corbette’s The Dreamers Dictionary from A to Z makes this clear:
Chinese. Chinese people or objects observed in a dream signify a satisfactory solution to all your problems. However, if the objects were damaged or the people seemed unfriendly, you may expect to make (or receive surprise guests from) a long journey.
The book ends wonderfully with the most famous dream in Chinese history when Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly. But then wondered if perhaps he wasn’t a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Campany muses about the way dreams are one method for making sense and organizing the world. They lean into questions of epistemology and how we can know what we know and the limits of our knowing. But dreams also illuminate the function and nature of change and transformation as an underlying reality. This is the “transformation of things” 物化. In dreaming himself to be a butterfly, the sage is engaged in a radical questioning of previous certainties in an attempt to “wake up” to a higher insight.
The book ends with a remarkable image of a 6th-century edict that was displayed as a plaque on the postal station at Xuanyuan, in the far western reaches of China not far from Dunhuang. Known as the Four Seasons in Fifty Articles詔書四時月令五十條 it was a list of what people should be doing in each season. And as Campany says so beautifully,
Like the wall inscription at Xuanyuan outpost, any grid posted at the border of waking life to try and and order the outlying domain of dreams must ultimately fail. The butterfly escapes, fluttering above and across the map’s earnest demarcations and out over the lone and level sands of formless desert. The transformations roll out as they will…
Leanne Ogasawara has worked as a translator from the Japanese for over twenty years. Her translation work has included academic translation, poetry, philosophy, and documentary film. Her book reviews have appeared in Kyoto Journal, the Dublin Review of Books, the New Rambler, and 3 Quarks Daily.