This is a book that has been just asking to be written, and who better to write it than the pre-eminent living historian of the late Ming and the Ming–Qing transition, Lynn Struve? Struve emphasizes the importance of dreams to developing a history of consciousness, as well as to understanding the particular circumstances of the late Ming. She has benefitted from the work of contemporary scholars in China who, by writing on “Chinese dream culture”, have provided convenient compendia of dream records, but as one would expect she brings her own original analysis to bear on this material. Building on her earlier articles on dreams published between 2007 and 2013, she makes a strong case that during the late Ming and very early Qing (while the Ming yimin or “remnant subjects” were still alive), the elite engaged with the world of dreams as never before or since. A fascination with dreams is common to most, if not all, human cultures, but as those cultures become more sophisticated, belief in the supernatural aspect of dreams – their ability to foretell the future, for example – tends to be relegated to the less educated strata of society. Yet in what Struve calls the “dream arc” of the late Ming to early Qing, even the most highly educated members of the literati and scholar-official class recorded and discussed their dreams in unprecedented numbers.

Why was this? An obvious reason is the dangerous social and political instability of the period, leading people to search for insights into the meaning of events and their likely course, but Chinese society has been through many periods of instability without showing the same elite interest in dreams. Struve looks for answers first by outlining what we know today of the science of dreaming, and then by discussing Chinese attitudes towards dreams through the ages, so far as we can reconstruct them from textual evidence, with a particular emphasis on the late imperial era. Records of the interpretation of royal dreams in such early texts as the Liji show a belief in the significance of dreams at the highest levels of government; late-Ming writers on dreams often referred to these records as a precedent for their own interest.

Struve then discusses the “special dream salience” in the late Ming, focusing on the philosophical, religious, and literary discourses on dreaming, and linking this “dream salience” to the “moral-ethical subjectivity” which is a distinctive aspect of Ming thought, and to the new interest in individual emotion (qing) as opposed to rationality so notable in this period.

The heart of Struve's book lies in the description and analysis of a range of dreams experienced and recorded by late-Ming and early-Qing (yimin) authors during the most unsettled years of the Ming–Qing transition and its aftermath. She examines how these dreams were experienced by the dreamers as reinforcement of their deeply held spiritual beliefs, sometimes permitting communion with dead or absent loved ones, or as escapes from the pressures of reality, or as merely disturbing and upsetting. She finds that after the Ming–Qing transition, a significantly greater number of Ming yimin than loyal Qing subjects continued to record their own dreams, and that after the yimin generation had died out, elite interest in dreams declined almost to vanishing point and did not revive even in the turbulence of the nineteenth century.

One aspect of late Ming dreaming which Struve touches on, but which this reviewer wishes she had examined more closely, is the intersection of dreams and garden culture. Perhaps the best known manifestation of this is in Tang Xianzu's Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting), which is discussed in Wai-yee Li's important article on “Gardens and illusions”, cited by Struve. Struve also discusses at some length Zhang Dai's essay on his ideal environment “Langhuan fudi”, supposedly seen in dreams. But in addition it is remarkable how many other late Ming descriptions of real or ideal gardens are related in some way to dreams, whether because the name of a garden building is inspired by a garden owner's dream, like Pan Yunduan's Studio of Five Possibilities, or because the creation of the garden proves to be the fulfilment of a dream experienced by someone else, such as Zheng Yuanxun's Garden of Shadows in Yangzhou, which turned out to be “just like” a garden dreamt of by Zheng's mother twenty years before. There is still much to be explored here.

Another aspect, not addressed by Struve, is the possible link between dreams and the ingestion of hallucinatory substances by late Ming literati. One of the most prolific late Ming writers on dreams, discussed at some length by Struve, was Dong Tuo (usually pronounced Dong Yue), author of the Supplement to the Journey to the West (Xiyou bu; translated by Lin and Schulz as The Tower of Myriad Mirrors). The late Glen Dudbridge, whose early research was on Xiyou ji and related texts, was of the opinion that the eccentric nature of Dong's works might well have been linked to the use of opium or other drugs, which was fairly widespread in the late Ming (personal communication). The possible interrelationship of dreams, drugs, and hallucinations at that time at least deserves further consideration.

This is a wonderful book, full of fascinating insights into late Ming cultural history. It is unfortunate that the publisher has decided to dispense with a glossary, instead combining glossary and index; the resulting so-called “glossary-index” is not much use as an index, being far too restricted, while as a glossary, it is confusing, because author names which appear in the bibliography of primary sources are not accompanied by Chinese characters in the “glossary-index” whereas other names are, and it is inadequate in that many words or phrases which appear only in pinyin in the book do not appear in the “glossary-index” at all, leaving the reader to supply the characters by memory or guesswork. Irritating as these unnecessary flaws are, they cannot substantially detract from this further addition to Lynn Struve's outstanding and illuminating research on the Ming–Qing transition.