Night 6 · Weekend long read · The dream thread

The Duke of Zhou and the Dreams We Make

周公与我们自己做的梦

甚矣吾衰也！久矣吾不复梦见周公！

How far I have declined! It has been a long time since I dreamed of the Duke of Zhou.

The Analects, Book 7 (Shu Er); also Wang Fu, Discourses of a Hidden Man, “On Dreams” (Qianfu Lun, Meng Lie)

02 Tonight

You wake with your heart still going a little fast. The dream was the office again, or an exam you forgot to study for, or someone you haven't spoken to in years. You lie there and can't help wondering what it meant.

03 How the ancients saw it

In China today, when someone dreams of a snake or of losing a tooth, there is usually a friend who says: look it up in The Duke of Zhou Interprets Dreams.

The Duke of Zhou lived three thousand years ago, a statesman in the early years of the Zhou dynasty. Tradition credits him with laying down its rites and music. No dream book survives from his own time. The ones that carry his name came much later; among the older surviving copies are Tang-dynasty manuscripts found at Dunhuang.

Why borrow his name? That story starts with Confucius.

What Confucius wanted most in his life was to bring back the order of the Duke of Zhou's age. When he was old, he said something that became famous: “How far I have declined! It has been a long time since I dreamed of the Duke of Zhou.”

Turn it around and it tells us something. For many years, Confucius often dreamed of the Duke of Zhou. The man he thought about all day walked into his sleep at night. Later generations remembered this, and the Duke of Zhou became a byword for dreaming.

About six hundred years later, in the Eastern Han dynasty, there lived a scholar named Wang Fu. He never held office. He lived out of sight and wrote, and he called his book Discourses of a Hidden Man. One chapter is about dreams.

Wang Fu sorted dreams into ten kinds. Two of them are enough for tonight.

For the first, he happens to use Confucius as his example. Confucius, born into a chaotic age, admired the Duke of Zhou's virtue by day and dreamed of him at night. Wang Fu calls this a dream of concentrated intent: when the mind is fixed on something completely, it dreams of it.

The second he calls dreams of remembered thought: “When people think of something, they dream of arriving at it. When they worry, they dream of the matter itself.”

Anyone who has spent a week packing for a move and then dreamed of boxes all night knows what he meant. So does anyone who has worried about a sick parent and then dreamed of a hospital corridor. The day doesn't stop at the pillow. It keeps going for a while, in a different language.

His list also has dreams that come from illness and dreams that change with the season. Read the whole list and many of the categories point away from omens in the sky and back toward the dreamer: what they thought about that day, what they worried about, how their body felt, what season it was.

Wang Fu was a man of the Han dynasty, and he didn't deny outright that dreams could carry signs. He was careful, though, about reading good or bad fortune straight off a dream. The same dream, he suggests, can mean quite different things for different people in different situations.

Bring that back to your bed tonight. If you dreamed of the office, it may be because the office hasn't come off your shoulders yet. If you dreamed of an exam, it may be because lately you've felt judged. If you dreamed of someone you haven't spoken to in years, maybe some part of you simply remembers them.

Seen this way, a dream works like a packing list. It shows what you carried to bed. The list may not be comfortable, but it is much easier to live with than an omen. An omen makes you afraid of tomorrow. A list just tells you that today was heavy.

If you want to try this tonight, you don't need a dream dictionary. Ask one small question: what was I carrying yesterday that looks like this? The answer usually comes quickly, and it is ordinary. A deadline. A message you haven't answered. A face you miss. Then you can set the list on the nightstand, so to speak, and go back to sleep.

One more small thing. Confucius's line about no longer dreaming of the Duke of Zhou is usually read as a sigh: he had grown old, and his ambition had faded. That reading holds. It can also be heard another way. A man who carried one great wish his whole life went to sleep one night without carrying it. That is a loss. It may also have been rest.

04 One line for the pillow

A dream shows what I carried today. It does not decide tomorrow.

05 A quiet image to end on

An inn at the end of a mountain road. A traveler sets a bundle down at the foot of the bed and unties the knot. In the dark, the two marks the straps left on his shoulders slowly fade.

Words of the night