Visions and Dreams in Early and Medieval China: A Few Thoughts on Neutrality and Authorial Voice

In early and medieval China, thinkers waxed poetic about the blurriness of the line that set apart dreams from reality. The famed “ butterfly dream ” from the Zhuangzi is the locus classicus for this view. If the boundary between dreams and reality is so porous, how much more is the demarcation between dreams and visions, two states of alternate consciousness that are strikingly similar in their basic grammar and core features. Indeed, both were understood as spontaneous forms of insight con-sisting of an encounter with beings who were inaccessible under normal waking cir-cumstances. A passage from the “ Explanation of Dreams ” ( Mengshuo 夢 說 ), a succinct fourteenth-century Daoist work, strikingly illustrates how dreams and visions —“ the marvels of the spirit ’ s excursions ”— could be two sides of the same coin: