Dreams of Interpretation in Early Chinese Historical and Philosophical Writings

Abstract

Abstract In the Zuo zhuan1 (Zuo Commentary Tradition, ca. fifth to fourth centuries B.c.?), the earliest narrative history in China, the representation of dreams emerges as one way to structure events and to impose order on human experience. Dreams establish causality-on the symbolic level, as a sign that is fulfilled, unravelled, or betrayed; on the literal level, as advice or warning heeded or defied. The representation of dreams is motivated by the need to interpret and define causes and consequences. In this sense it asserts or questions the “readability” of the world and shapes our understanding of causality, human agency, and possible “reason in history” (be it a moral scheme rewarding good and punishing evil, or a certain vision of order or teleology). I suggest that themes of control and order, or lack thereof, are dominant. Thus with dreams that realize ritual disorder or improper relations between the human world and the realm of the spirits, interpretation restores ritual equilibrium. Even when the message of the dream, often about the dreamer’s death, is implacable, the struggle of control over its meaning is evident in the dream itself and/or its interpretation. Arbitrary injunctions in dreams and equivocal dreams that invite different decoding augur moments of loss of control, which are often overcome with interpretive ingenuity, but which nevertheless lead us to consider the scope and meaning of skepticism.