Visiting professor discusses importance, relevance of dreams

Written by Shelby Whitehead

The murder mystery of a man and his wife, a ghost story of a man seeing his deceased mother and a man being accidentally buried alive sound like Halloween tales, but they are actually written accounts of ancient Chinese dreams.

A Vanderbilt University professor of Asian studies suggested refining the way people understand dreams from a personal experience to a way of engaging society, using Chinese dynasties of the past to inform the interpretation of the present.

Robert Campany suggested modern dreams can be influenced by past dreamers by analyzing dreams as a way to communicate with society though signs, images and meanings in his lecture “Dreaming in Common: The sociality of dreams in China,” which took place in the Lindsay Young Auditorium on Monday evening.

“To dream is to participate in a language,” Campany said.

Campany illustrates this contrary notion of dreams as being like finding fossils. When the fossils are discovered, they are interpreted to reveal the way it may have looked in the past by what is present in the bones. It cannot be heard or seen, and its living form is invisible, but there is still an understanding of the part that is absent by the part that remains.

In the same way, dreams are suggestions and interpretations that give image to the invisible.

The beings, Campany explained, communicate through and objects or actions in dreams that sometimes defy reality, oftentimes revealing an idea that was shrouded in the waking day.

“The thing about dreams is they seem strange while we’re having them because, in them, you’re very rules of waking experience do not apply.”

Campany claimed dreams are an interactive process between individuals that can inform them of humanity and divinity. The divine use dreams as a response to devotional action, scripture, or the fulfillment of prophecy, Campany explains.

“We seem to be closed-off when we’re asleep, and open when we’re awake,” he said. “In China, the default view seemed to have been the opposite; it’s when sleeping that we are uniquely open to being touched by other beings.”

Elements of the dream and their interpretation worked as a code of science in which neither the interpreter nor the dreamer were free to assign any meaning they like to the dream’s imagery. The interpretation was bound by the code so that each symbol had a specific and static meaning written in dream book.

As a society, the Chinese would discuss the dreams, interpret the meaning, and share it as a means of communicating the abstract.

Featured image by Ryan McGill

Edited by Taylor Owens