Both Robert Ford Campany's and Lynn A. Struve's recent monographs center on dreams in China. The two works underscore the import of integrating dreams into a mainstream understanding of all dimensions of historical life. Neither work is meant to be read as a survey of dreams or dream narratives; rather, both offer a compelling and complicated picture of how dreams were understood in a particular time period. Because of the nature of the topic of dreams, both works are introspective and self-reflective.

The similarities end there. Apart from the obvious difference of temporal boundaries, Campany in The Chinese Dreamscape writes from the perspective of a philosopher, while Struve in The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World writes from the perspective of an intellectual or cultural historian. While Campany focuses on a series of dream-text-inspired paradigms to understand the place of dreams in the Chinese worldview, Struve uses dream texts to understand then-contemporary views of human consciousness and how the mind works. Both approaches offer merits in their own right and pair well in their introspective qualities; taken together, we have a beautifully complex understanding of dreams in China over a millennium based on meticulous readings of dream texts.

Campany maps the so-called Chinese dreamscape based on a variety of textual records, including scriptures, classics, biographies, essays, anecdotes of dream divinations, histories, treatises, anthologies, poems, dream interpretation manuals, and manuscripts from the end of the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) to the late Tang (618–907 CE). The dreamscape, as Campany explains, refers to what people imagined dreaming was, what they did with and about dreams, and the roles that dreams played in their lives. In what is promised to be the first of two volumes, Campany delineates five paradigms—exorcistic, prospective, visitation, diagnostic, and spillover—that allow a thematic understanding of what people did with dreams. Dreams were exorcised through ritual action, offered a means of understanding the future, provided the dreamer's spirit the opportunity to visit another realm, helped frame health problems, and allowed dreamers to practice self-cultivation in which the dream advanced the practice.

Each of Campany's chapters offers a close textual reading of his five dreaming paradigms. Campany uses text to reconstruct the Chinese dreamscape, raising philosophical questions about the meaning of dreams (for the dreamers, dream interpreters, and recorders of dream interpretations), the impact of the performative aspects of dream interpretation, and the ways in which dreams were treated as forms of social memory. Campany concludes that the dreamscape is an ongoing mapping project.

Struve delves into a more closely bounded temporal space in which, she argues, “dream sensibility was the salient characteristic of self-expression and cultural production among the intellectual elite” (p. 4). She takes us to the so-called Ming-Qing transition, a period from about the mid-sixteenth century through the end of the seventeenth century, and focuses on the ways in which particular historical factors precipitated what she terms a “dream arc” (p. 5). In this time and place, dreams and dreaming emerged as a central theme in the intellectual elite's writings. Struve grounds her deep dive in earlier dream sources, of course, referencing the ways in which the Ming-Qing understanding of human consciousness was shaped by earlier writings, such as the Zuo Chronicles and Master Zhuang (or Zhuangzi). It is to later writings—plays, biji, fiction, Buddhist scripture, poetry, philosophical texts, and more—that Struve devotes the bulk of her analysis. Subjectivity, the nonrational, emotions, spontaneity, and the personal were elevated in the writings that Struve analyzes. Struve connects the prevalence of dream writings and the turn to the inner life with the often violent fraying of the late Ming social fabric, the subsequent disintegration of the Ming dynasty, and its overthrow by the Qing. These disruptions amplified the neurocognitive tendencies of intellectual elites to turn their attention within, and therefore to dreams.

For Struve, dreams offered a medium through which literati could link their interests; thus, dreams featured prominently in writings in nearly all fields. The point of studying the dreams of people in the past is that it allows us to access the “subjective consciousness” of the elite who were, as Struve argues, the trendsetters in their civilizations. Moreover, including dreams in our understanding of history allows us another window through which we can understand linguistic conventions and even the history of consciousness itself, at least indirectly, in the sense of what people wrote about consciousness and how they experienced it, which, in turn, illuminates how they understood themselves existentially. Thus, Struve's work offers an understanding not simply of what Ming-Qing literate elites understood of dreams, but what they understood of themselves. Such an internal focus in the collective understanding of consciousness is key for understanding what comes later, not only in intellectual developments, but in the political and social landscape as well.

Given the proliferation of and importance attached to writings on dreams in China during all periods, the publication of scholarly monographs in English delving into these sources is long overdue and welcome. After reading Campany and Struve, we must acknowledge the centrality of dreams in all aspects of life from 300 BCE through the Ming-Qing transition. Dreams can no longer be relegated to fringe studies, but will be embraced into the mainstream of intellectual and cultural history.

There is room and, indeed, need for further exploration of this topic. Campany promises that his is the first of two volumes. In the second volume, perhaps he will continue with the same paradigms, or maybe he will offer a different set of paradigms. I await that publication with anticipation. Still, these works represent but two approaches to dreams in Chinese history. For a fully three-dimensional dreamscape, to borrow Campany's term, future scholars may take up the role of gender in dreaming, the technical aspects of dream divinatory manuals, transregional differences in approaches to dream interpretation, the changing role of dream interpreters over time, or the social connections between those who wrote and published about dreams, to name a few possibilities.

These two works will appeal to Sinologists with interests in the fields of philosophy, textual studies, literature, and religion. I imagine they will also offer important and exciting additions to the reading lists of dream studies scholars, psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, philosophers, and psychologists. Both monographs will appear on my own comparative history of dreams syllabus.