The field of oneirology is experiencing something of a renaissance, both in general and in the sinological context, as attested by the publications, conference panels, specialist workshops, and doctoral dissertations produced on the topic in the last several years. Campany's The Chinese Dreamscape is at the forefront of such scholarship. In addition to its many other virtues, which will be discussed below, this book is also noteworthy for its position in the author's intellectual trajectory. For example, the discussion of the cultural logics of dream interpretation and dream telling are a natural extension of the nuanced analysis of medieval Chinese cosmography he proposed in Strange Writing (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996). Such intertextual connections, which are filigreed throughout the book's robust and copious footnotes, highlight its status as a product of mature scholarship.
The Chinese Dreamscape's overall approach to the topic can be summarized as follows. The first chapter provides a helpful introduction to both the subject matter and Campany's approach to it. In particular, and in addition to the utility of the robust theoretical toolkit outlined therein, this introductory section is notable for its recognition of the author's historical and cultural situatedness. For example, rather than assuming that any contemporary Western dream theory can be applied non-problematically to the classical/medieval Chinese context, it instead offers a useful heuristic typology of dream paradigms drawn from historical Chinese textual sources. The second chapter outlines traditional Chinese dream etiologies, as well as some typological schemes that were employed to categorize oneiric phenomena. In so doing, it highlights a significant disjunction between “psychologized” approaches to dreaming and the majority of traditional Chinese understandings: specifically, in a cultural context where many dreams were seen as readable omens, and others as encounters with beings (whether beneficent or malevolent), it was comparatively rare to view dreams as personal, interior phenomena; they were instead often understood in “relational and intersubjective” terms (p. 65).
Next, chapter 3 presents a detailed overview of traditional Chinese dream interpretation, drawing primarily on philosophical and mantic texts. While this topic has been covered before (by Ong, Strassberg, Drège, and Drettas, among others), Campany's analysis of this material stands out due to his encyclopaedic command of the primary sources and the secondary scholarship on them, his judicious citations of relevant cross-cultural examples, and his sophisticated exploration of the epistemological and hermeneutical assumptions implicit in the notion of “readable” dreams. The fourth chapter, building on the previous, elucidates and complicates this issue by exploring the types of stories that were told about dream interpretation and those who performed it, making use of the notion of “discourse communities” that Campany has so productively employed in his recent scholarship. The final body chapter considers dreams as loci of intersubjective interaction. In outlining the visitation paradigm, he provides various examples of oneiric encounters with animals, humans (both alive and dead), and extrahuman beings; such examples allow for a fruitful discussion of the affordances of intersubjective dreaming, and – thus – the cultural work being done by such accounts (pp. 145–6).
My only substantive critique is the author's decision, informed, no doubt, by the exigencies of academic publishing in 2020, to divide a cohesive body of research into two discrete books: the first (The Chinese Dreamscape) focusing primarily on the meaning(s) of dreams and their interpretation, and the second (the forthcoming Dreaming and Self-Cultivation) focusing on dream-related practices. This division creates several small issues: first, the second volume will inevitably require a certain degree of reduplication of material from the admirably detailed and thoughtful account of Chinese dream paradigms, typologies, and etiologies presented in the first two chapters of this one. Second, and as implied by the numerous (at least ten) footnote references to the forthcoming volume scattered throughout The Chinese Dreamscape, the distinction between these topics is somewhat artificial. For two simple examples, the practice of dream telling (chapter 4) and the phenomenon of dream encounters with extrahuman agents (chapter 5) are often associated with oneiric practice. While I have no doubt that the forthcoming volume will be a robust and substantial contribution in its own right, I cannot help but pine for the day when this entire project could have been released as an organic whole.
This minor quibble notwithstanding, it is my pleasure to offer a full-throated recommendation of this work. It delivers an admirable synthesis of past and present oneirological research, in the Chinese context and cross-culturally, while also presenting a compelling new application of the analytical toolkit that Campany has been honing over his last 25 years of scholarship (such as notions of cosmography, discourse communities, and the performative and semiotic functions of storytelling). Moreover, the author's recognition of dreaming as an embodied process, and of the complex, recursive interactions between dreams, bodies, and cultures, clearly informed his decision to cite relevant theories and examples from across the social scientific corpus (e.g. anthropology, history, psychology). This resulted in a laudably interdisciplinary study, equally relevant to sinologists and oneirologists.
While its depth and sophistication may render parts of it inaccessible to non-specialist readers, I would consider assigning chapter 4 to an advanced seminar of undergraduate or masters students, as it offers a concise, compellingly argued introduction to narrative analysis as a scholarly method, while also providing numerous insights into the classical and medieval Chinese dreamscape. Moreover, while all chapters feature original translations by the author, chapter 4 is particularly valuable for including various lengthy selections from narrative sources, some of which had not previously been rendered in English.
In all, this is a landmark publication. Just as the previous generation of researchers on the topic could not help but cite Carolyn T. Brown's edited volume Psycho-Sinology: The Universe of Dreams in Chinese Culture (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1988), I predict a similar future for this slim volume.
