Dream-Generated Poetry and Virtuality in Seventeenth-Century China

My paper examines several poems written in the style of regulated poetry and one fu (rhapsody) composed by the seventeenth-century Chinese poet Dong Yue 董說 (1620–1686) as the outcome of his active collaboration with his dreams (certain couplets in these poems were even produced within dreams). Dong Yue, a native of the Jiangnan region, was a prolific literary author as well as a scholar, book collector, and traveler with extensive knowledge in a wide range of topics, ranging from astronomy and medicine to poetics and Buddhist canons. Dong had a reputation for his obsession with dreaming: he not only documented unusual dreams he had in a profuse way but also founded a dream society and solicited submissions of dream records from like-minded dreamers to build a community for recording dreams that have literary and aesthetic merits. Through an examination of poems including “On Dream Journey, Written for the Traveler Roaming around Five Lakes,” “Supplementing the Lines from a Dream,” and “Documenting a Dream from the Seventh Month” by Dong Yue as an effort to document a series of marvelous dream experiences, I attend to an analogy that the poet consistently drew: the process of literary writing is like that of dreaming. I suggest that this observation is more than a wordplay; it reflects the poet’s sensitivity towards the way in which the process of literary creation enables virtuality. By choosing the theme of virtuality, I offer a focused analysis of poetry’s ability to conjure up lifelike visions and imaginary experiences and to make them tangible, sharable, and in turn, real—a key aspect of poiesis as a transformative mechanism specific to literary writing.

Many poets before the early modern period, including Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), also reported composing poetry within their dreams. But Dong’s extensive documentation of dreams through literary writing and his theorization of the relationship between dreaming, virtuality, and literary composition is unprecedented and unparalleled. In a letter response to a friend, Dong openly stated that he has no interest in deciphering his dreams in a fashion that follows the convention of dream divination—interpreting a dream as a world of symbols that would in turn shed light on the real world; instead, he records dreams because they enable an experience of transformation and transcendence as well as embody an aesthetic ideal featuring connectivity with the otherworldly. Dong uses the poetic language to replicate the logic of dreaming—specifically, by coming up with descriptions of fabricated dreams as a means of demonstrating an autonomous source of creativity that literary writing emulates.

To situate the poems analyzed in this paper within the corpus of literary works produced by Dong in his lifetime, it is worth noting that the poet also allegedly wrote the novel A Supplement to the Journey to the West, an adaptation of the renowned fourteenth-century novel Journey to the West. In A Supplement to the Journey to the West, dream is not only a central metaphor but also a key technique for enabling narrative development while it also draws extensively from the way in which dreams, among other illusions, are discussed in Buddhism. At the same time, Dong’s conversion into a Buddhist monk in 1651 was a loyalist response to the demise of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). For this reason, existing scholarship on Dong Yue shows an inclination of analyzing his literary works primarily through the lens of Buddhism and Ming loyalism. My paper offers a corrective to this analytical approach: while I acknowledge the indelible impact of these sources of ideological influence on Dong’s literary aesthetics, I regard Dong as a literary and media theorist on his own terms. I show that Dong’s approach to documenting and conceptualizing dreams is a media-theoretical one: the way he discusses dreams, which is sensitive to the nature of dreams as virtual experiences (as opposed to a medium for manifesting the unconscious on a personal or a social level), deeply resonates with current discussions of virtuality in the context of digital media. Dong’s extensive documentation of and reflection on dreams is his own way of developing a theory of mediation specifically for illuminating the process of literary creation.

Granted that virtual reality is a term for describing a type of computer-generated simulation, saying that literary works have their own ways of creating a virtual reality experience results in a loose comparison at best, since literature produced prior to the digital era can lead to immersion but not to the same kind of interactivity as the one enabled by virtual reality. But dream-generated literature does offer us ample insights on virtuality, which is the mechanism at the heart of both virtual reality and a dream experience. Delving into the similarity between dreaming and the process of literary creation in the context of dream-generated literature would lead to a more nuanced and specific understanding of the conditions that allow literature to produce virtuality.