Deciphering Dreams: How Glyphomancy Worked in Late Ming Dream Encyclopedic Divination

Abstract

Both the 1562 dream encyclopedia Mengzhan yizhi 夢占逸旨 (Guidelines for Dream Divination) and the 1636 dream encyclopedia Menglin xuanjie 夢林玄解 (An Explication of the Profundities in the Forest of Dreams) consisted of individual examples of accurately divined dream interpretations whose cumulative weight proved that the divination techniques worked consistently and should be used. The content of the dream encyclopedias revealed the specific nature of the techniques. In the dream encyclopedias, individuals’ dreamed problems were solved using glyphomancy (the dissection of Chinese characters), demonstrating the importance of written Chinese characters in dream divination. I show that glyphomancy not only revealed divinatory answers, but in some instances, accurately predicted the timing of life's events.