ISBN:
9780674247796
,
9780674247802
Language:
English
Pages:
xvi, 260 Seiten
Series Statement:
Harvard-Yenching Institute monographs 122
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als Campany, Robert Ford The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE
DDC:
154.6/30931
Keywords:
Dreams
;
Dream interpretation History
;
To 1500
;
China
;
Traum
;
Traumdeutung
;
Geschichte 300 v. Chr.-800
Abstract:
"Dreaming is a near-universal human experience. But there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape-an array of divergent ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke-that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions people the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE-800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with-and celebrated-the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming"--
Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
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