Contenu du sommaire : Récits de rêve en Asie orientale

This paper explores the relationship between dreams and political legitimacy through the lens of the late Ming dream encyclopedia Guidelines for Dreams and Dream Divination (Meng zhan yi zhi). It argues that one way in which rulers communicated their legitimacy was through dreams, interpreted accordingly and documented in textual records. Dream interpreters used multiple modes of dream interpretation techniques—symbolism, homophonic resonances, and glyphomancy—to grant legitimacy and expose disloyalty. Dream interpretations were central to a shared understanding of the past, the then-unfolding present, and the future. The dream interpreter helped bind symbolic reality to political reality and as such wielded considerable political power.

Dreams about deceased loved ones as narrated in funerary orations (chemun) written roughly between 1600 and 1820 are used to study the Chosŏn literati's way of dealing with bereavement. Close parallels could be found with the results of contemporary Western psychological studies on dreams about the dead. These findings suggest that the Chosŏn literati conceptualized interpersonal relationships and, ultimately, subjectivity in ways that do not lend themselves to dichotomic juxtapositions with (modern) Western individuality.

‪In Japan, the word mu/yume 夢 covers a broad conceptual space. It encompasses notions such as “dream” or “vision,” which are rather distinct in many cultural and linguistic areas. For instance, in ancient Japan, dreams were perceived as a path the gods or the buddhas could take in order to make their wills known to humans, and as such they had a form of exteriority. The present article analyzes the apparitions of the deceased Emperor, father of the Prince Genji, in the Tale of Genji. By comparing them to those of Hamlet's father's spirit in Shakespeare's tragedy, we can highlight how the narrative structure of the Tale of Genji makes expert use of the potentialities of ancient Japan's conception of dreams.‪

‪From the beginning of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1129), poems soberly titled “composed in dream” (meng zhong zuo 夢中 作) start to appear. Most often, they present themselves not as a rewriting of a dream but as a poetic creation of which rarely more than one verse is directly derived from a word that arises during an effective dream. The present inquiry intends to devote itself to the emergence of this poetic motif from the beginning of the Song Dynasty to the more constant practice by Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101), of which more than twenty pieces bear this title. Thus, some significant poems are studied, from the first listed by Diao Kan 刁 衎 (954-1013) to those of Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007-1072) or Mei Yaochen 梅堯臣 (1002-1060) before analyzing the way Su Shi uses this motif and transforms it. It is, therefore, a matter of questioning the issue of the poetic space of the dream, of the fabrication of what might be called a “poetic setting” for the dreamlike word, of the staging of strangeness and the status of the dreamer as well as the themes emphasized in the poems bearing this title.‪

In the Chinese poetic genre of youxian (roaming as a transcendent) which excels at fantasizing the other world, writers strive to demonstrate their erudition by refashioning the existing materials from the treasure-trove of Chinese literary and religious texts. By focusing on the case of Li E (1692–1752), a leading Qing poet who wrote as many as three hundred youxian poems, this article explores how dream allusions help personalize the poet's self-expression in such a conventional genre. It argues that despite the intricate and often obscure content of his youxian poems, studying Li's use of dream allusions can sharpen our understanding of his poems, especially his literary constructions of an extraordinarily talented man.

‪After listing all the dream sequences, long or short, found in a 1620s novel, Chan zhen yishi禪真逸史, and showing which rhetorical tools its author uses to open and close these literary dreams, the paper focuses on the study of three dreams that play an important part in the narrative's structure. Though these dreams were initially interpreted by other protagonists according to the oneiromantic knowledge of the time, it is the elements that these initial readings overlooked that would have a greater effect on the later developments of the tale. Without contesting the value of the divinatory knowledge of dreams, the novelist thus proves himself capable of undertaking original explorations, religious and psychological, in the world of late imperial Chinese dreams.‪

This article is an attempt to explore the emergence of subjectivity in two Qing classical short stories: while using classical patterns, they also reveal elements about the dreamers' psychological states. The analysis shows that far from being clear-cut, the emergence of subjectivity was a non-linear process—a “premodern” way of writing. This disguised way of expressing subjectivity conveyed a renewed creative investment at a time when classical literature almost reached the edge of modernity.

Zhang Sheng's dream at the end of the fourth book of the celebrated zaju of the Yuan period—The Story of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji) by Wang Shifu—has attracted little attention. Yet it is of central importance as it involves essential information concerning the relationship between the two main characters of the story and their contradictions. This is highly consequential, as the Xixiang ji features at the core of the Chinese imaginary of love during the whole premodern period. This particular dream scene inherits from a long lineage of textual tradition, and in turn has had a lasting influence on other texts. The interpretation of this dream by Jin Shengtan, which we can infer through his own edition of the play in the 17th century, is highly compatible with a modern approach, as could be drawn from Jacques Lacan's theory of desire, the subject, and the Other.