Dreaming Is a Contact Sport

Many of my dreams are workaday in the sense that I am doing quotidian things: reading. writing and editing, giving lectures and workshops. Just now, in a sleep dream, that became lucid, I was selecting and posting excerpts from Chinese texts that described social interaction by dreamers traveling in their astral bodies, with distinctive terminology. I pictured bustling scenes of many soul travelers coming and going, meeting and parting in astral realities.

My first action, on getting out of bed, was to reopen relevant books from the current piles on my desk, At the top of the heap, Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China 300 BCE-800 CE by Robert Campany, a professor of Asian and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt. The book fell open at a page I had marked up heavily in pencil in a previous reading. The passage was on my oneiric theme: how people meet up and

make trouble in dreams.

"To dream is to contact or be contacted...This notion, often implicit, occasionally emerges into clear view, as in a passage in the Qiwu lun chapter of the Zhuangzi (ca. 300-150 bce):

"While it [the heart-mind, xin 心] sleeps, the cloudsouls contact [things]
When it wakes, the bodily form opens up [to sensory contact]
Whatever we come in contact with entangles it
Each day we use that heart-mind of ours for strife.

"The view of dreaming implied here is that dreaming occurs when one of our multiple souls - cloudsouls (hun 魂 ) whitesouls (po 魄 ) or simply the dreamer's spirit (shen 神 ) - wanders outside the body during sleep. But it is specifically the souls' contacts with other beings that constitute dreaming and therein lies the risk."

Campany notes that jiao, one of the verbs used for oneiric contact, means more: it implies touching with the senses of the dreambody; it may suggest "intertwine" or "intercourse". There is a note of caution here: watch who you are with when your body is sleeping. Those multiple souls get around. In the Later Han period, Daoist sages fixed the number of hun souls at three and the number of po souls at seven. We are many, and we can be in two or more places at once.