“I dream” (xix). Thus begins Brigid E. Vance’s Escaping the End of Times. During the five months I spent waiting for the review copy to arrive from Hong Kong, I often found myself wondering how this book would begin. I imagined the familiar openings: a touching anecdote drawn from Ming sources, a clear statement of the central argument, or a succinct review of existing scholarship followed by the identification of a gap or lacuna. But it never occurred to me that the book would open, so powerfully, with the author’s own dream—her anxiety and curiosity—and an invitation to each reader to reflect on our “own curiosity about dreams” in a particular way: “through a series of historical encounters and dream puzzles or puzzling dreams” (xxii).

The opening touches me as did Hegel’s preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit. He begins by calling both superfluous and misleading the scholarly habit of wanting to know up front what a book’s argument is, what problem the author seeks to address, or how the work differs from others. For “the truth is the whole”Footnote ¹; to give an extremely simplified reading of Hegel, truth can be attained only through the unfolding of one’s own experiences, as each stage of consciousness reveals the limits of the one before it and gives rise to a new form of understanding.

I think that Brigid E. Vance likewise offers a metacritique of the conventional ways in which histories are written. Humanistic scholarship, her book in effect reveals, should not be reduced to a process of “knowledge production” detached from the researcher’s own lived experience. To be sure, we historians should not fall into the trap of anachronism by imposing present-day expectations upon the past. Yet this does not mean that we must treat our own sense of wonder, confusion, and frustration as slag to be smelted out in the process of refining our arguments and analyses. As I read it, this is the core argument of the book, and the chapters unfold in a manner that exemplifies her new approach.

Chapter 1 begins with the author’s 2015 visit to Nine Carp Lake in Fujian. In the literati tradition, a lake is not merely an aggregation of water and other material elements, but a meaningful whole constituted through “layered textual accounts” (p. 10). To arrive at a famous lake is thus also to be exposed to its tradition and to engage in a textually mediated conversation with previous visitors. Vance accordingly enters into a sustained conversation with Xu Xiake 徐霞客 (1587–1641), the Ming traveler who once confronted the same lake, with the associated texts, and with the various perplexities surrounding dreams. The chapter is therefore not a study of Xu Xiake, but an exercise in thinking with him. It sets the stage for understanding that, while dreams are personal experiences, our interpretations of them are mediated through sites and texts.

If Chapter 1 shows how a site mediates experiences across two different eras (late Ming and the present), Chapters 2 and 3 introduce a critical negation: the late Ming literati and the author inhabit fundamentally different worlds. Late Ming scholars confronted a range of crises—from ecological to economic and political (p. 51). Even their understanding of dreams carried a distinct epistemological weight: literati saw dreams not as mere illusions, but as bearing a deeper, more complex relation to reality (p. 60). Late Ming literati accessed and circulated knowledge through their own vibrant print culture, which shaped how they interpreted their experiences, dreamed and lived.

With Chapter 3, the author zooms in on a specific case: the Ming literatus Chen Shiyuan 陳士元 (1516–1595), who turned to the study of dreams out of frustration with officialdom. Chen’s aim was not to innovate or to establish a new theory of dreams (p. 88), but to map a terrain through which fellow literati could move among earlier texts and interpretations of dreaming. The resulting Guidelines for Dreams, by categorizing knowledge about dreams, constituted a map of the literati’s world. When the author notes that her initial inspiration for the entire project (p. 68) emerges from this work, she also completes her methodological preparation: although she and the Ming literati inhabit fundamentally different worlds, the lake, the texts, and the experiences of dreaming all serve as channels of mediation, making possible a deeper resonance between past and present.

I read Chapters 4 and 5 as two case studies built upon such preparations. Chapter 4 opens with a moment that profoundly moved the author: on a sweltering summer day in 2008, in the quiet, air-conditioned reading room of the National Archives of Tokyo, she first touched a late Ming edition of An Explication of the Profundities in the Forest of Dreams (p. 93). Perhaps many of us as researchers have such moments in rare book rooms. Yet our training and the conventional formulas of academic writing lead us to strip such moments of their emotional force in our scholarship. The author shows that this is neither necessary nor productive. Instead, she allows her immediate sense of wonder to guide the analysis that follows, showing how it led her to pursue further questions: about the compilation and structure of the book, the ways contemporaries used it, and its later reception.

While Chapter 4 reveals how the author entered a late Ming intellectual world through the shock and wonder of her 2008 archival encounter, Chapter 5 reminds us once again that she ultimately remains an outsider. Her intellectual background differs radically not only from that of late Ming literati, but even from that of present-day Chinese literati scholars. Put differently, the author arrives at another kind of shock: entering into the ideas and assumptions about understanding the past that late Ming readers regarded as entirely self-evident (p. 147) demands from her enormous effort. With this insight, Vance has arrived at the end of the journey through which she informs both herself and her readers: she and the Ming dreamers both share so much and have so little in common.

Taking the book as a whole, I find the author’s method distinct from the l’égo-histoire explored by French historians.Footnote ² L’égo-histoire likewise emphasizes the importance of the researcher’s own experiences and emotions, situating them within broader historical contexts. Were the author to have adopted such a method, she would have reflected on how her interest in China and her journeys there formed part of larger global political and cultural transformations, and she would likely have considered how her modes of questioning and chosen topics emerged from the intellectual history of the past decades or even centuries. The method this book pioneers is fundamentally different. Rather than autobiographically weaving her own trajectory into a larger scholarly and historical context, the author engages in a dialogical process of inquiry.

What the author persistently probes is the relationship between her own intellectual concerns and those of late Ming readers—their points of convergence as well as their profound divergences. The book repeatedly asks how someone shaped by a radically different intellectual and historical world (today) can nonetheless enter into meaningful dialogue with the late Ming literati. At this point, the author’s own experiences become a medium through which the distance between past and present is rendered visible and partially bridged—bringing the unbridgeable dimensions of that distance ever more sharply into view.

Overall, the book is meticulously researched, and its translations are consistently careful and accurate.Footnote ³ More importantly, closing this book, I could not help but feel that the author’s experiences had somehow become my own: the sensation of first touching a rare edition, the bewilderment of contemplating dreams beside Nine Carp Lake, or the excitement of suddenly perceiving the deeper meaning of a single Chinese character. In a new era in which AI can perform an enormous range of tasks—including, now or perhaps one day, surveying existing scholarship or articulating argument-like statements out of scattered threads or vast raw materials—Brigid Vance’s daring exploration into bringing lived experience into academic writing points a way forward. Those experiences are, after all, our own.