Zhuangzi's butterfly and the Chinese dream tradition

The passage occurs at the end of the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, a foundational Daoist text compiled around the fourth to third century BCE.

Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about, happy and doing as he pleased, and did not know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke, and was solidly and unmistakably Zhuang Zhou. But he did not know whether he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.

The passage concludes that between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction — and calls this the transformation of things.

What it is doing

It is usually read in the West as a sceptical puzzle about knowledge — how can we know we are not dreaming? — and placed alongside Descartes.

Scholars of Chinese philosophy generally regard that reading as importing a foreign concern. The Zhuangzi is not building toward a foundation for certain knowledge, and it does not treat the inability to distinguish as a problem to be solved.

The chapter it closes is concerned with the relativity of perspectives and with the arbitrariness of the distinctions we impose. Its argument throughout is that fixed categories — right and wrong, useful and useless, this and that — are perspectival rather than absolute.

The butterfly passage is the conclusion to that argument rather than a sceptical challenge. The final phrase, the transformation of things, points toward the ceaseless changing of forms into one another. The question is not "which am I really" but a suggestion that the demand for a fixed answer misunderstands the situation.

The practical tradition, which is quite separate

Alongside the philosophical material, China developed one of the world's largest bodies of practical dream interpretation.

The Zhou Gong Jie Meng — the Duke of Zhou's dream interpretations — is the best known. Attributed to the Duke of Zhou, an eleventh-century BCE statesman revered by Confucius, the text as it circulates is far later, and it functions as a dream dictionary: an image, a meaning. It remains widely consulted, and versions of it are readily available in China today.

Dream divination was also an official activity. The Rites of Zhou describes a court position responsible for interpreting the king's dreams, classifying them into six types, and reporting on them at the year's end. Oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty include queries about dreams, indicating divinatory concern with them well over three thousand years ago.

Medical dream theory

The most distinctive Chinese contribution, and the one least like anything in the Western tradition.

The Huangdi Neijing — the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, the foundational text of Chinese medicine, compiled around the Han dynasty — treats dreams as diagnostic information about the state of the body's organs and the balance of yin and yang.

The text describes specific correspondences. An excess of yin produces dreams of crossing great waters and being afraid; an excess of yang, dreams of great fires burning. When both are in excess, dreams of killing and destruction. Excess in the lungs produces dreams of weeping and of flying; in the liver, dreams of anger; in the heart, dreams of laughter and fear; in the kidneys, dreams of the spine separating from the body.

This is a genuinely different framework. Dreams are not messages from gods, nor disguised wishes, but symptoms — physiological readouts of internal state, to be used alongside pulse and complexion in reaching a diagnosis.

It is, interestingly, the closest of the ancient traditions to a continuity view: dreams as caused by the dreamer's current condition rather than by anything external.

Dreams in Chinese literature

The literary tradition is extensive. The Tang dynasty tale of the Governor of the Southern Tributary State, in which a man falls asleep under an ash tree and lives a whole career, marriage and downfall in a kingdom that proves to be an ant colony beneath the tree, is one of the best-known treatments of the dream-as-life theme.

The eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the great works of Chinese fiction, uses dreams structurally throughout, and its title announces the theme.

Why the pairing is instructive

Chinese tradition contains, side by side, a philosophical text using dreams to dissolve the distinction between states, a court divinatory apparatus predicting the future from them, a medical system reading them as organ symptoms, and a popular dictionary assigning fixed meanings.

None of these needed to displace the others, and they coexisted for two millennia. Which is a useful corrective to the assumption that a culture has a theory of dreams. Mostly they have several, held simultaneously by the same people for different purposes — a description that fits contemporary societies at least as well.