Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Joe McCormick and it is Saturday, so we
Speaker 1: are going down into the vault for an older episode
Speaker 1: of the show. This one originally published on June twenty second,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, and it's part three of our series
Speaker 1: called Dreamfall into the Dark. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 3: This is the third episode and what I believe is
Speaker 3: going to be a four part series about dream mystique,
Speaker 3: dream culture. We're going to have one more episode that
Speaker 3: is going to focus on Japanese dream.
Speaker 1: Culture and finally get to that monster that is the
Speaker 1: reason we started looking at this.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, we've been chasing after that monster and ultimately
Speaker 3: we will chase it across the sea and discuss its
Speaker 3: form and function. In this one, we're going to get
Speaker 3: more properly into the main focus of the Dreaming Mind
Speaker 3: and the end of the Mean World by Lynn A. Struve,
Speaker 3: which we've been referring to in these episodes. This was
Speaker 3: published in twenty nineteen by the University of Hawaii Press. Naturally,
Speaker 3: we're not going to cover everything in that, but rather
Speaker 3: you know, highlight some of the key points, some interesting
Speaker 3: bits that stand out, and leave you to explore the
Speaker 3: book yourself if you want to go deeper in on it.
Speaker 3: But in the previous episodes two episodes, we mostly discussed
Speaker 3: other dream cultures from around the world, highlighted lighted by
Speaker 3: Stroove as being sort of hot beds of focus on
Speaker 3: the potential of dreams to impact our daily lives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, particularly times in places when a lot of dream
Speaker 1: writing was produced, a lot of literature that that still
Speaker 1: comes down to us, whether that's individual like from journals
Speaker 1: and diaries and letters and stuff, or you know, published
Speaker 1: works that concern dreams and often invest kind of some
Speaker 1: some significance beyond just psychological curiosity in dreams.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because there's always going to be some sort of
Speaker 3: dream culture in play. There's going to be you know,
Speaker 3: dreams are a reality among all of us, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just it's a human, universal, human experience.
Speaker 3: You know, we're going to have these strange visions, mundane visions,
Speaker 3: comforting visions, disturbing visions, or traumatizing visions come to us
Speaker 3: in the night. It is the you know, we we
Speaker 3: we talk so much, you know, on the show, but
Speaker 3: in the culture in general about you know, visions brought
Speaker 3: on by things that are less every day, you know that,
Speaker 3: be it some sort of a you know, peculiar encounter
Speaker 3: or the use of some sort of substance that creates
Speaker 3: a vision. But the thing about dreams is the dreams
Speaker 3: open up the door to visions pretty much every night,
Speaker 3: like it's just with regular frequency, and something is always
Speaker 3: going to be made of that in a given culture.
Speaker 3: But these are those periods of times where they really
Speaker 3: went all in, especially among like the literary, you know,
Speaker 3: the upper echelon of the like the theological branch of
Speaker 3: a given culture.
Speaker 1: Now, in the introduction to Struve's book about the dream
Speaker 1: arc in the End of the Ming Dynasty in China,
Speaker 1: she does talk about how, basically, like any time and
Speaker 1: place she has examined, there seems to be a trichotomy
Speaker 1: of explanations for dreams. There's always sort of in the
Speaker 1: mix a way of saying, well, that dream is just
Speaker 1: sort of a natural phenomenon. Maybe it's a result of
Speaker 1: you digesting a bit of mustard or cheese. There is
Speaker 1: a way of saying that the dream is given to
Speaker 1: you by a demonic force or bad spiritual entity. And
Speaker 1: there's a way of saying that a dream is given
Speaker 1: to you by a by a heavenly force, or it's
Speaker 1: some kind of inspiration, it's a positive supernatural gift, and
Speaker 1: that kind of does permeate. You can find those three
Speaker 1: explanations all around the world at basically all times in places.
Speaker 3: Yeah, God, devil or potato, and I guess at times
Speaker 3: that you know, you may lean more towards one or
Speaker 3: the other, though I guess it seems to be the
Speaker 3: case that you know, all three are going to be
Speaker 3: in play to some degree, because I mean, how all
Speaker 3: in can you go on say the devil or evil
Speaker 3: spirit understanding of dreams without having to sort of release
Speaker 3: the pressure a little bit and saying, you know, not
Speaker 3: all of these are the devil, some of these are
Speaker 3: just a potato, and you know, maybe some of these
Speaker 3: are actually useful as well. Now, one thing I wanted
Speaker 3: to touch on here at the start is coming back
Speaker 3: to something we discussed towards the end of the last
Speaker 3: episode is the idea that when you have a given
Speaker 3: culture that really like opens the gates on dreaming. That
Speaker 3: that says, in one way or another, dreams matter. Dreams
Speaker 3: are important, and we all have access to them. You know,
Speaker 3: this can open the floodgate, and this can perhaps require
Speaker 3: some individuals to sort of move in and individuals and
Speaker 3: positions of power, et cetera, to sort of say, well,
Speaker 3: let's let's reconsider that, or let's let's maybe think about
Speaker 3: what this particular dream means. And of course the main
Speaker 3: candidate here would be anytime dreams are interpreted as being
Speaker 3: the will or revelations of a God or God's or
Speaker 3: dreams as revelations of the future.
Speaker 1: The main context in which this came up was our
Speaker 1: discussion of the role of dreams in early Quakerism, where
Speaker 1: a lot of meetings of the religious Society of Friends
Speaker 1: and publications by this fledgling religious group would discuss dreams
Speaker 1: people had as prophetic revelations from God. But of course
Speaker 1: that gives any individual person a lot of power and
Speaker 1: authority to say, like, I had a dream. This might
Speaker 1: be from God, and the dream could say anything. It
Speaker 1: might say something really destabilizing to your to your social group,
Speaker 1: or it might give a kind of really destabilizing political exhortation.
Speaker 1: Maybe we need to do something that could get us
Speaker 1: into trouble with the authorities. So yeah, you had to
Speaker 1: have a kind of dream police, as it were, Like
Speaker 1: leaders of the early Quakers ended up kind of steering
Speaker 1: dream interpretation and selective publication of dreams to rock the
Speaker 1: boat less, essentially to to be like, oh, let's not
Speaker 1: let's not do anything too crazy. Now, how about we
Speaker 1: just interpret these dreams as you know, applying to individual
Speaker 1: moral behavior rather than having any kind of radical, broader
Speaker 1: social or political implications.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So there are there are two examples from
Speaker 3: Chinese history in Chinese considerations of dream that I want
Speaker 3: to share here from her book The Tie into This.
Speaker 3: The first is an example that far precedes the Ming dynasty.
Speaker 3: Struve shares an account of one Xiao xi Lang, a
Speaker 3: disciple of the great polymath Tao hong Jing of the
Speaker 3: fifth and sixth centuries bcee. So, hong Jing insisted that
Speaker 3: most of his disciples visions. This is the man that
Speaker 3: had various visions and would write about these visions were
Speaker 3: waking visions. These were visions he's having during the day,
Speaker 3: you know, the kind of thing that we might think
Speaker 3: of is being brought on by like meditation or something
Speaker 3: of that nature. But Zhao's own dream records, it seems,
Speaker 3: are just increasingly dream focused if you look at them
Speaker 3: in chronological order, until all of his alleged visitations with
Speaker 3: Dallas deities are conducted via dream as opposed to waking
Speaker 3: visions of one sort or another, and he ultimately believes
Speaker 3: himself summoned to the celestial realm, so he intentionally overdoses
Speaker 3: on poison in order to obey those summons. So ultimately
Speaker 3: kind of a haunting tale, but one of these where
Speaker 3: you can see like this push and pull, one individual
Speaker 3: pulled strongly into the dream visions, and this kind of
Speaker 3: attempted course correction, either course correction or some attempt to
Speaker 3: sort of alter the account a little bit and say, well,
Speaker 3: you know, actually they weren't all dream visions. Most of
Speaker 3: them were or are waking visions, and those are ultimately
Speaker 3: more important. And this will become essential when we talk
Speaker 3: a little bit more about this idea of what dreams
Speaker 3: represent and what the waking world represents in sort of
Speaker 3: the larger Chinese cosmology. Now, she also shares an interesting
Speaker 3: situation concerning a prominent Jesuit missionary to China the name
Speaker 3: of Guglio Alini who lived fifteen eighty two through sixteen
Speaker 3: forty nine, and this individual enacted a strict policy of
Speaker 3: rationalistic dream and sleep interpretation among Christian followers in China
Speaker 3: at the time. In other words, the idea was no
Speaker 3: divine dreams, even for the devout. And one reason for
Speaker 3: this would seem to be that the people of Maritime
Speaker 3: of Fujian Province were said to have a strong zeal
Speaker 3: for the power of dream, very strong dream culture, and
Speaker 3: that this particular missionary had to contend with quote a
Speaker 3: virtual cult of sainthood concerning the dream accounts of a
Speaker 3: convert to Christianity named zang Shi. It would seem that
Speaker 3: Jesuit records of this time insisted that these dreams occurred
Speaker 3: during periods of ill health, to further push them aside
Speaker 3: into that dismissable realm of dreams as byproduct or residue,
Speaker 3: the potato realm, as opposed to the divine realm. So
Speaker 3: of course, this is of course, again a Jesuit missionary.
Speaker 3: So this is an outsider with an outside faith that
Speaker 3: has been introduced into China. It's contending with like a
Speaker 3: with a local indigenous dream culture.
Speaker 1: Well right, yeah, so as a Catholic missionary, he would
Speaker 1: want to be presenting a sort of a stable theology
Speaker 1: to people. It's like, this is what comes from the
Speaker 1: Bible and from the Church, and you can't like change
Speaker 1: anything by having a dream and getting a new revelation
Speaker 1: from God. It's all already here for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean very obviously, the Catholic Church is kind
Speaker 3: of like the poster child of top down religion, top
Speaker 3: down theology, and historically they have not reacted well to
Speaker 3: new revelations among them, like the lower tiers. Now, to
Speaker 3: move on to the Ming Dynasty period, the late Ming
Speaker 3: Dynasty period in particular, that's the main focus of the book,
Speaker 3: it's probably necessary to add just a little historical context.
Speaker 3: So the Ming Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China
Speaker 3: ruled by the Han people. They had overthrown the Mongol
Speaker 3: led Yuan dynasty in thirteen sixty eight and would ultimately
Speaker 3: succumb to the Manchu led Qing dynasty in sixteen forty four.
Speaker 3: The Qing dynasty would be the last imperial dynasty of China,
Speaker 3: and so Struve is dealing mostly with the late Ming Empire,
Speaker 3: this period that she describes as a time of disintegration,
Speaker 3: the empires in decline, it's threatened and ultimately overthrown by outsiders.
Speaker 3: And then also she's dealing with the immediate period thereafter
Speaker 3: the early Qing dynasty, in which you have all of
Speaker 3: these people who have the Han people within this dynasty
Speaker 3: who have gone through all this change and are dealing
Speaker 3: at times with the trauma of that change. And incidentally,
Speaker 3: she also gets we're not going to have time to
Speaker 3: get in any of this, but she has a number
Speaker 3: of mentions of the writings of pousong Ling, who wrote
Speaker 3: the Strange Tales from the Chinese Studio. He's born shortly
Speaker 3: after the fall of the Ming dynasty in that period
Speaker 3: of transition, So if you're interested in pousong Ling, this
Speaker 3: is also a book worth picking up.
Speaker 1: Referenced frequently on this show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, pousong Ling a lot of weird tales that he
Speaker 3: shares concerning everything from ghosts and trolls and goblins to
Speaker 3: you know, at times just kind of there's more than
Speaker 3: one sort of body story thrown in there as well. Now,
Speaker 3: other key factors during this time period, according to struve.
Speaker 3: She says, there is a trend toward moral ethical subjectivity
Speaker 3: in spiritual exploration. There was a mounting dysfunctionality of the
Speaker 3: state system in political culture, which meant that you had
Speaker 3: a lot of individuals that would you know, otherwise have
Speaker 3: been focusing their energy on advancing themselves and applying themselves
Speaker 3: in official state positions, but they're unable to, so they're
Speaker 3: left to engage personal projects. They're left to indulge inward gazing,
Speaker 3: in this pursuit of dream and fed by all of this,
Speaker 3: there is also a general questioning of the rationalism and
Speaker 3: emotional control that was part of sort of the dominant
Speaker 3: mean philosophy and politics up to that point. And just
Speaker 3: in general again, the decline of one dynasty and the
Speaker 3: pending emergence of a new dynasty, there's this growing sense
Speaker 3: of a loss of control for many, she says, a
Speaker 3: sense of uncertainty that leads to an increased focus on
Speaker 3: cosmic answers and inward reflections, both of which, as we've
Speaker 3: been discussing, are universally sometimes sought out through the world
Speaker 3: of dreams, and this is very much part of dream
Speaker 3: culture in China of the day as well. Now Strepp
Speaker 3: discusses the legacy of Chinese dream interpretation at length, going
Speaker 3: back well before this period, of course, to shamanistic traditions
Speaker 3: of old, similar to some of what we discussed concerning
Speaker 3: the Ottoman dream culture, but she explains that the understanding
Speaker 3: of dreaming at its most basic and Chinese tradition was
Speaker 3: considered in terms of course of yin and yang, and
Speaker 3: in two sort of broad ways of looking at it. So,
Speaker 3: in one school of thought, which she calls the Partheid model,
Speaker 3: wakefulness is the yang state and sleep or dream is
Speaker 3: the yin state. So it's in the yin state that
Speaker 3: one's two souls, the terrestrial soul and the aerial soul,
Speaker 3: become disconnected, allowing the yen state of the souls to
Speaker 3: explore without anchor of the yang. And if these two
Speaker 3: souls don't recouple upon waking, well, then you die. And
Speaker 3: thus there's this long standing connection between sleep and death
Speaker 3: in Chinese thought, I guess I'm assuming, also coupled with
Speaker 3: the with the obvious observation that when we sleep it's
Speaker 3: kind of like we're dead. Also in dream, it's said
Speaker 3: via this model, the drifting soul might encounter quote avatars
Speaker 3: of the forces of justice and fate that one would
Speaker 3: not normally encounter in the mundane world, but you might
Speaker 3: encounter them in dream and therefore you might suffer ill
Speaker 3: dreams and nightmares as punishments.
Speaker 1: But basically the idea that when the material like the
Speaker 1: grounded soul and the aerial soul separate during sleep, the
Speaker 1: aerial soul can kind of wander and have encounters with
Speaker 1: other ghosts or ancestors or other beings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and also just more broadly, that the waking world
Speaker 3: is the yang world and the dream world is the
Speaker 3: yen world. But then this other model, which she calls
Speaker 3: the phasic model, it takes a different approach to yin
Speaker 3: and yang and dreams and wakefulness. In this one, the
Speaker 3: idea is that a sleeping individual will cycle in and
Speaker 3: out of different phases of yin and yang throughout one's
Speaker 3: sleep at night, and this would be in the form
Speaker 3: of dreamlessness and dreaming. So in this what goes on
Speaker 3: in our sleep mirror mirrors just all the other patterns
Speaker 3: in our life, just a pattern of yin and yang
Speaker 3: and know and ultimately you want these to be in
Speaker 3: balance with each other. This school of thoughts, she writes,
Speaker 3: stress natural causes of dreams and nightmares rather than the supernatural,
Speaker 3: So not saying that it was just all potato, but
Speaker 3: leaned more potato than the other model.
Speaker 1: That's interesting because obviously it mirrors the true fact that
Speaker 1: we don't dream the entire time we're asleep, that there
Speaker 1: are specific phases of sleep during which we dream or
Speaker 1: during which streaming is heightened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's also interesting concerning some other things that come
Speaker 3: up in the book about just thinking about different ways
Speaker 3: that a night's sleep may go. And indeed this sort
Speaker 3: of idea that some positive that you could have an
Speaker 3: entire night's sleep that is completely dream free, that you
Speaker 3: can avoid dreams entirely, or you can avoid all sorts
Speaker 3: of one type of dream in favor of another.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, that brings up another way of thinking
Speaker 1: about dreams that is different than I think anything we've
Speaker 1: discussed in this series so far. We've focused a lot
Speaker 1: on people attaching various kinds of supernatural, revelatory or prophetic
Speaker 1: power to the contents of their dreams. But you know,
Speaker 1: another thing that seems to be fairly common in the
Speaker 1: world is just having beliefs about ways to have a
Speaker 1: good dream, Like when you want to have a good
Speaker 1: dream as opposed to a bad one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think this is like a lot of
Speaker 3: what's going on, particularly in the Chinese example, is occurring
Speaker 3: again among the elites, among the intellectual elites and theological
Speaker 3: elites of the day, and it gets, you know, it
Speaker 3: gets rather complex. But I think like when you get
Speaker 3: down to some of the more like shamanistic roots of
Speaker 3: all of this and sort of like the average individuals
Speaker 3: like sort of base understanding of dreams, you kind of
Speaker 3: come down to those some of the like the really
Speaker 3: key questions. Obviously, one question is is this real or
Speaker 3: is it not? And if it's not real, where does
Speaker 3: it come from? If it is real, where does it
Speaker 3: come from? And what does it mean? That sort of thing.
Speaker 3: But then also like coming down if you ask the
Speaker 3: average individual just on the street, hey, what do you
Speaker 3: think about dreams? Even today? They might be like, I
Speaker 3: don't know, you know, dreams or dreams whatever. But if
Speaker 3: you ask them what do you think about what is
Speaker 3: your opinion on nightmares? Most people are going to say
Speaker 3: I don't care for them. I would prefer not to
Speaker 3: have them. And so there's I think there's always going
Speaker 3: to be that level of the dream culture as well,
Speaker 3: like can we do something about these nightmares? I mean,
Speaker 3: this is nice that you have all these thoughts about
Speaker 3: like where these are coming from, But I would tell
Speaker 3: me how to not have the nightmare.
Speaker 1: Whether Scrooge is being tortured by the actual ghost of
Speaker 1: Jacob Marley or it is just the bit of mustard
Speaker 1: or the crust of bread that is causing it. Either way,
Speaker 1: it is unpleasant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, this is I'm sure preaching to the
Speaker 3: choir universally among our listeners here. But you know, nightmares suck.
Speaker 3: They disrupt your night's sleep, and by disrupting your night's sleep,
Speaker 3: you're gonna inevitably disrupt your waking day to follow, not
Speaker 3: only like on a physiological level, but also a potentially
Speaker 3: on a mental or emotional level. And we have to
Speaker 3: bear in mind that like bad dreams and nightmares can
Speaker 3: also be intensified via stress and trauma in life. So
Speaker 3: you know, it's like this boulder rolling down a hill,
Speaker 3: and I think we can all, you know, understand that
Speaker 3: that desire to want to stop that boulder or to
Speaker 3: diminish it somehow before it slends into us. And that's
Speaker 3: without even getting into some of the more extreme examples
Speaker 3: of parasomnia, night terrors, and so forth, like just sort
Speaker 3: of like normal nightmares can be horrible. They're horrible for us,
Speaker 3: and then certainly as parents, you know they're horrible when
Speaker 3: you're having to deal with someone, especially a young child,
Speaker 3: but also other loved ones when they're experiencing them, because
Speaker 3: there's this kind kind of helplessness to it, right, like
Speaker 3: you can't protect them in their dreams. So we'll get
Speaker 3: back to this general topic of like traditions and customs
Speaker 3: regarding the prevention of bad dreams and sort of opening
Speaker 3: the door for more positive dreams. But this also brings
Speaker 3: up something that I'm sure a number of you have
Speaker 3: been thinking about listening to these episodes, and you've probably
Speaker 3: been wondering why it hasn't come up yet, and that
Speaker 3: is the topic of so called lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is,
Speaker 3: of course, you know, the idea that you can take
Speaker 3: the wheel of your dreams, that within your dream you
Speaker 3: can realize you are dreaming and say, hey, I'm going
Speaker 3: to flip the script here, I'm going to do whatever
Speaker 3: I want.
Speaker 1: Essentially, it's interesting because it often seems to hinge on
Speaker 1: the question of whether you can realize when you are dreaming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, it's something that my understanding from
Speaker 3: having you discussed it on their show in the bast
Speaker 3: is that it's something you got to work at. People
Speaker 3: do apply themselves to it, and people do report results.
Speaker 3: I've never applied myself to it, and therefore the few
Speaker 3: times that I do have lucid moments in my dreams
Speaker 3: where I realize that I am dreaming, I immediately fall
Speaker 3: out of it. So I'll have a dream where I'm like, Hey,
Speaker 3: this is a dream, and then I'll be like, what
Speaker 3: did I just think? I don't remember, and then I'm
Speaker 3: back under the spell of the dream, and this will happen.
Speaker 3: The times that it's happened like this, It'll just happen
Speaker 3: like several times in a row, and I'm unable to
Speaker 3: shake the delusion of the dream.
Speaker 1: I think I've shared this on the show before, but
Speaker 1: my experience is every time in a dream I start
Speaker 1: to wonder if I'm dreaming or not, I think, no,
Speaker 1: this is definitely real. It seems to imply I don't know.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that means I'm a specially prone to delusions.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's hard for me to like in the dream.
Speaker 3: I'm always like, I bring my own like waking sort
Speaker 3: of cautiousness to the dream. So I was thinking earlier
Speaker 3: about like substances within dreams, drugs within dreams, for example,
Speaker 3: which I've read some wonderful fictional treatments of this before.
Speaker 3: But the times where I've been offered, say, a drug
Speaker 3: within a dream, I'm always like, no, thank you, I
Speaker 3: don't know what's in that will I will politely decline,
Speaker 3: And then afterwards I'm like, well that, why didn't It's
Speaker 3: a dream like that, this is the place to try
Speaker 3: strange substances the dream world. But no, I don't realize
Speaker 3: it's a dream, so I don't give it a go.
Speaker 1: Dream cocaine can't hurt you.
Speaker 3: So, as we've discussed on the show before, the term itself,
Speaker 3: lucid dreaming originates in nineteen thirteen with Dutch psychiatrist Frederick
Speaker 3: van Eaton, but he was hardly the first person to
Speaker 3: recognize that the dreamer can become aware that they are
Speaker 3: in a dream and then influence the shape of that dream.
Speaker 3: That this basic idea had been written about in Europe
Speaker 3: for centuries and in ancient times. You have the likes
Speaker 3: of Saint Augustine, Galen, Aristotle. They all wrote about it
Speaker 3: in Asia of The concept was also understood among ancient
Speaker 3: Hindus and early Buddhists, and so this was certainly recognized
Speaker 3: in the dream culture of the late Ming period as well. Interestingly,
Speaker 3: Streve only mentions lucid dreaming once in the book, but
Speaker 3: it's still notable. In one section, she is discussing Juan
Speaker 3: ying Ming, an important Neo Confucian thinker of the Ming dynasty.
Speaker 3: He is said to have followed a Taoist practice of
Speaker 3: deep meditation that minimized both sleep and dream And I
Speaker 3: suppose in this we see a reflection of that idea
Speaker 3: that there is a threat posed by the irrational dreams.
Speaker 3: You know, this is these are to be avoided because
Speaker 3: this is where I do not have like intellectual and
Speaker 3: emotional control.
Speaker 1: Hmmm.
Speaker 3: So I take it to mean he was just maybe
Speaker 3: not a big fan of dreams anyway. He wrote very
Speaker 3: little about dreams himself, but he was a big proponent
Speaker 3: of something known as the lung shi, which Struve describes
Speaker 3: as the infant mind, an innate sense of right and
Speaker 3: wrong that you can think of this as a kind
Speaker 3: of innate conscious. This is, in fact it if you
Speaker 3: put it into like translators, this is how it'll be
Speaker 3: translated in the modern sense. It's kind of a it's
Speaker 3: your conscious. It's you know, this innate sense of right
Speaker 3: and wrong, and it's said to be present even when
Speaker 3: we are infants. So it's something that is not you
Speaker 3: don't learn in books or school. It is something sort
Speaker 3: of innate and pure within the human.
Speaker 1: Psyche conscience without the law.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which and where it gets interesting with concerning dreams
Speaker 3: is that young Meing insists that the Langxi is active
Speaker 3: all the time in both waking and sleeping, making sure
Speaker 3: that any dreams you have are going to be prescient
Speaker 3: rather than mere delusions of dream sleep. I guess you
Speaker 3: would maybe agree that the reason I'm turning down the
Speaker 3: dream cocaine is because of my lang Gie or some
Speaker 3: semblance of my lang Gi, I don't know. But more
Speaker 3: importantly to his teachings, specifically, it was meant that the
Speaker 3: core of spiritual truth was not something limited to intellectuals,
Speaker 3: but something available to everyone from birth, and therefore, you know,
Speaker 3: it had wide popularity and would be the kind of
Speaker 3: thing the idea that you know, non intellectuals would also
Speaker 3: gravitate towards. But here's where the lucid dreaming comes in.
Speaker 3: One of his contemporaries, lu hongs Shin wrote of a
Speaker 3: dream he had as a young boy to demonstrate the
Speaker 3: importance of Langxi, and in particular, this account involves his
Speaker 3: five year old self channeling the lang Ghi in order
Speaker 3: to overcome the delusions of dream and instead lucid dream
Speaker 3: his way out of it. And Struve also says that
Speaker 3: this was a way to illustrate the importance of Budeau
Speaker 3: Dallas thought even among less radical followers. There's a full
Speaker 3: account of the dream in the book, and the dream
Speaker 3: itself is pretty simple. It's not you know, it's not crazy.
Speaker 3: He dreams himself in a wide, busy street full of
Speaker 3: carts and people, and there, I guess the one implied
Speaker 3: dream world aspect of it is that the mansions towering
Speaker 3: overhead are kind of dizzying, so I'm imagining something more
Speaker 3: like Times Square as opposed to something that would actually
Speaker 3: be appropriate for the time period. But then he realizes
Speaker 3: it's all a dream, and he starts shouting at all
Speaker 3: the people, saying something along the lines of hay, dummies,
Speaker 3: don't you know this is a dream, and they don't listen.
Speaker 3: They just kind of shrug it off and keep doing
Speaker 3: their things. So he laughs at them, he claps his hands,
Speaker 3: and he wakes up, and then as an adult, he
Speaker 3: goes out. You know. In retelling this, he also uses
Speaker 3: this to sort of compare it to the waking world
Speaker 3: as well, which is of course, is a common motif.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes,
Speaker 1: when we talked about in a Halloween show we did
Speaker 1: a few years back, where there is a character who
Speaker 1: keeps insisting to everyone around him that he is dreaming
Speaker 1: and they only exist right now because they are in
Speaker 1: his dream, and whenever he wakes up, they're going to
Speaker 1: cease to be, so it's in their interest for him
Speaker 1: to keep dreaming. And it turns out he's like on
Speaker 1: death row about to be executed for a crime. He's like,
Speaker 1: don't execute me, because then you will no longer exist.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, we discussed
Speaker 3: that in one of the anthology of Horror episodes, I believe.
Speaker 1: But Hang Han doesn't make that case to the people
Speaker 1: around him. He's just like you don't know you're in
Speaker 1: a dream right now.
Speaker 3: To bring things back into a less sort of wider
Speaker 3: consideration of dreams. During the ming period, again there's this
Speaker 3: idea that waking as yang and dream as yin only
Speaker 3: in the waking state do you have like true clarity
Speaker 3: and penetration, though with a number of caveats, you know,
Speaker 3: we get into this idea, like we say in the
Speaker 3: Three Varieties of Dreams, and I saw these discussed elsewhere
Speaker 3: in Strew's book with the confusion take on everything, the
Speaker 3: idea of true dreams or dreamless dreams, those non delusional
Speaker 3: dreams which are said to arise spontaneously versus strange dreams
Speaker 3: or nightmares, which I think we can compare to the
Speaker 3: you know, the infernal interpretation, and then stirrings which arise
Speaker 3: in response to life experiences, which of course is clearly
Speaker 3: the potato category. But by the seventeenth century there is
Speaker 3: also this idea that in sleep, some part of the
Speaker 3: dream is allowed to wander like an unbridled horse, a
Speaker 3: horse that is still tame, though, and may report back
Speaker 3: to the body with wisdom. Again touching into some these
Speaker 3: ideas we've discussed already about half the soul wandering and
Speaker 3: having these encounters, opening the possibility for divine visions and
Speaker 3: so forth. Struve summarizes that all of this begins with
Speaker 3: a general trend towards subjectivity and neo Confucianism, but then
Speaker 3: it gains more momentum through Dallist and Buddhist thought and
Speaker 3: Ming intellectual circles. These are, of course, the three major teachings.
Speaker 3: And then the dream culture permeates the literary and visual
Speaker 3: arts of the time period, producing apparently more dream related
Speaker 3: works of art and literature in China than any other period.
Speaker 3: And everything is then sort of wrapped up in the
Speaker 3: vortex of a dynasty at its end, and then ultimately
Speaker 3: the aftermath of that end. And she says that while
Speaker 3: all cultures have their dream cultures, dreams are not considered
Speaker 3: with equal seriousness across all of them, especially among the
Speaker 3: educated elite. But one of her core arguments is that
Speaker 3: the Late Ming period is the most radical period of
Speaker 3: Chinese dream culture, given that one could make a good
Speaker 3: case for it being the most radical period of dream
Speaker 3: culture in recorded human history. And here's one more interesting tidbit.
Speaker 3: Strew argues the quote the total effect of these changes
Speaker 3: was to weaken the distinction that people normally drew between
Speaker 3: waking and non waking awareness and to make doubts about
Speaker 3: parsing reality and unreality emblematic of the age.
Speaker 1: Is this real life?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So yeah, just such a fascinating look at this
Speaker 3: time period, which again check out the book if you
Speaker 3: want to really go go and deep on it. It's
Speaker 3: very readable, very interesting stuff. But just the take home, yeah,
Speaker 3: is that perhaps arguably like this may be the period
Speaker 3: certainly in Chinese tradition, in Chinese history, but maybe even larger,
Speaker 3: maybe within human culture or recorded human history entirely, like
Speaker 3: this is the period of time where the focus on
Speaker 3: dreams becomes like so pronounced that that you're like weakening
Speaker 3: our popular understanding of the day between reality and unreality.
Speaker 3: It's it's fascinating to think about it.
Speaker 1: And ultimately, what is the argument Struve makes about why
Speaker 1: the literature and art of this period is so dream focused?
Speaker 3: You know, I think it comes down to those converging elements.
Speaker 3: You know that we we we touched on earlier. You
Speaker 3: know that you have a dynasty at its end, you
Speaker 3: have you have the intellectual circle within the intellectual circle,
Speaker 3: you have all these individuals who aren't able to apply
Speaker 3: themselves to state craft and state function, and then these
Speaker 3: various sort of theological and intellectual trends that are converging
Speaker 3: as well. So it's, uh, you know, it's you know,
Speaker 3: comparable to some of the other examples we've pointed out,
Speaker 3: where it's like you have a mix of sort of
Speaker 3: things that are going on within within the zeitgeist and
Speaker 3: then within the intellectual circle, and then things going on
Speaker 3: in the external world that are kind of forcing this
Speaker 3: narrowing thought or focusing a thought on dreams and the
Speaker 3: power of dreams.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about ways to compare and contrast with
Speaker 1: the features of the Quaker example that we talked about
Speaker 1: in the previous episode, and if this makes any sense
Speaker 1: to you, let me know. I was kind of noticing
Speaker 1: an interesting difference, which is that both seem to be
Speaker 1: very dream focused cultures that arise when there is a
Speaker 1: lot of political and social change. Again, the founding of
Speaker 1: the Quakers coming out of the period of the English
Speaker 1: Civil War and the interregnum period, and then everything you
Speaker 1: just discussed about the late Ming example. But one difference
Speaker 1: seems to me that at least the way Struve characterizes
Speaker 1: a lot of the dream obsession of the Late Ming period,
Speaker 1: it seems to be kind of a retreat. It's like
Speaker 1: avenues of earthly material focus might be kind of closed off,
Speaker 1: so there is a retrial tree to looking for significance
Speaker 1: and purpose in the dream world. Whereas for the Quakers,
Speaker 1: it almost seems like the focus on dreams is more
Speaker 1: of an advance mode or an attack mode, rather than
Speaker 1: a retreat. You know. It's like there is intense focus
Speaker 1: on dreams as a way of getting guidance for the
Speaker 1: next step forward for a growing and very exuberant, enthusiastic
Speaker 1: religious group. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think a strong case could be made for that.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess in both cases it does seem
Speaker 3: like people are turning to dreams, at least in part
Speaker 3: for answers and understanding for either self reflection or like
Speaker 3: a cosmic understanding of what's going on in the world.
Speaker 3: But yeah, there's something about or at least in these writings,
Speaker 3: we've looked at the way that the Quaker approach does
Speaker 3: feel like dream tonight, act tomorrow, Whereas a lot of
Speaker 3: the way it's discussed by Streuve concerning the Late Ming dynasty,
Speaker 3: it's like dream tonight and maybe dream the next several
Speaker 3: nights less focus on like what is the immediate action,
Speaker 3: or so it seems to me.
Speaker 1: Though, to bring up another example we talked about you
Speaker 1: in the first episode on this in the series focused
Speaker 1: on like the Romantic period in English literature, like the
Speaker 1: Romantic the British Romantic poets and so forth, which I
Speaker 1: think are largely interpreted in some ways is a reaction
Speaker 1: to the Industrial Revolution and to modernity. Like the literature
Speaker 1: of the English language Romantic period is often interpreted as
Speaker 1: an attempt to escape the realities of the modern world
Speaker 1: and especially industrialization.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so dream dream tonight, write poetry tomorrow, or create
Speaker 3: visual art tomorrow, and that, of course we see that
Speaker 3: reflected in the main example as well, the creation of
Speaker 3: all of this dream literature and also dream visionary arts
Speaker 3: as well. Yeah, and I can't help but come back to,
Speaker 3: you know, wondering about you know where we are now,
Speaker 3: I mean we, as we've discussed, you know, our modern
Speaker 3: understanding of dreams is largely potato based, you know, with
Speaker 3: some forays into these other worlds, but also today.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but just to clarify, if
Speaker 1: you happen to tune in late on this series. We're
Speaker 1: using potato as a shorthand just for naturalistic explanations of
Speaker 1: dreams based on a passage and Scrooge. We're not literally
Speaker 1: saying that everybody thinks it's caused by digestive issues, though
Speaker 1: that has been one of the naturalistic explanations people have
Speaker 1: used over the years. I think today a lot of
Speaker 1: people would say the contents of dreams are just I
Speaker 1: don't know, kind of obscure psychological causes. It's things you've
Speaker 1: been thinking about and so forth.
Speaker 3: Though I am brought back once again to our beans
Speaker 3: episode talking about like the link between beans and I
Speaker 3: remember us getting into that a little bit, like perhaps
Speaker 3: like beans digestion, beans association with the spirit world and ghosts.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: But I mean today not only do we have being
Speaker 3: still and certainly we still have dreams, but we also
Speaker 3: have all of these technological means of throwing ourselves down
Speaker 3: the chasm of other worlds, you know, I mean, we
Speaker 3: have virtual worlds, we have various you know, video game
Speaker 3: worlds and so forth. So I don't know how we
Speaker 3: would factor all of that into it as well. M Yeah,
Speaker 3: like to what extent is the creation and the not
Speaker 3: only the creation of, but the yearning for digital virtual
Speaker 3: world's a yearning for like a dream world of our
Speaker 3: own design, a sort of a lucid or semi lucid creation.
Speaker 1: Sold's a dream realized as a nightmare.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's this like straight up matrix stuff
Speaker 3: right here. I guess, like, yeah, but so it's not
Speaker 3: a wholly original thought. But yeah, I can't help but
Speaker 3: wonder about it.
Speaker 1: Well, Fortunately, if you are stuck in an Internet bad dream,
Speaker 1: you can log off. Always remember that you can. You
Speaker 1: can detach from the device.
Speaker 3: That's right. All right, Well, we're going to go ahead
Speaker 3: and close out this episode, but join us Tuesday, I believe,
Speaker 3: for the final episode in this series. In the meantime,
Speaker 3: if you want to go back and listen to any
Speaker 3: other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find
Speaker 3: them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed
Speaker 3: Core episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays, we
Speaker 3: do a listener mail episode where we'll inevitably be discussing
Speaker 3: everybody's dreams some more, as we've done in the past
Speaker 3: and we'll continue to do in the future. On Wednesdays,
Speaker 3: we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode.
Speaker 3: In fact, the monster then inspired this series was originally
Speaker 3: going to be a monster fact episode, but it just
Speaker 3: got too big, and then on Fridays we set aside
Speaker 3: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
Speaker 3: on Weird House.
Speaker 1: SEMA huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com.
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