The Second Annual Robert Morrell Memorial Lecture in Asian Religions: "Five Promontories on the Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE – 800 CE"

Professor Rob Campany is writing a book that probes ideas and practices involving dreaming in China in late classical and medieval times. The book is a map of sorts, a map of what he likes to think of as the Chinese dreamscape: the range of ways in which dreams were conceived and responded to, as reflected in various genres of texts. In this talk, Professor Campany presents and compares five notable examples. First, texts prescribing exorcistic ways to prevent the recurrence of nightmares; second, “dreambooks,” lists of dream elements paired with what they portended in the dreamer’s future; third, a Buddhist dream key that “reads” dream contents not as predicting the future but as revealing things about the dreamer’s karmic past that are responsible for his present progress on the bodhisattva path; fourth, a young Daoist practitioner’s record of his revelatory dreams of tutelary gods; and finally, an early medieval “philosophical” text that makes rhetorical use of the phenomenon of dreaming to argue about what is real and what is knowable.

Dreaming is a private experience, and an inherently rather strange one. But the processes by which meaning is spun from dreams are social. Many approaches to dreams in China involved attempts to map them somehow, bring them into some sort of order, fix them into grids and read them as signs from a chartable cosmos. Some approaches saw them as something more akin to butterflies, flying free of all maps, signifying nothing but the folly of map-making.