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.

The Daoist Art of Perfected Sleep

Daoist Master Chen Tuan (871-989) was a celebrated sage who lived a secluded life in mountain caves in China, where he created kung fu and a profound practice of conscious dream travel.  He was an ardent student of I Ching. He reputedly wandered the country in disguise, and sometimes provided warnings of impending events such as the flooding of the Yellow River. He was said to travel beyond his body for months at a time. A young monk who found him awake on Huashan, his western mountain sacred to the Goddess, received the following instruction:

I practice the sleep of the perfected
Store up the breath of gold and drink the juice of jade
I lock the golden gate within, so it cannot be opened,
I close the door of earth within, so it cannot be broken.

The green dragon guards the Eastern Palace,
Perfected energy circles in my Pond of Cinnabar
The white tiger stands before the Western Hall.
And spirit water revolves around my five inner orbs.

I call the gods of Jia and Ding to adjust the time;
I summon all the hundred spirits to guard the inner chamber.

Then my spirit
leaves to ascend to the Nine Palaces above
Frolics in the sky's azureness
With it, I step on emptiness as if on solid ground,
Rise up as easy as if falling down.

I inhale the flowery essence of the sun and moon
I sport in the wondrous landscape of vapors and of haze
I visit the perfected and discuss the principles beyond
I join immortals and we go off to visit strange worlds.

Delighted I wish to return
My feet step on clear wind
My body floats on rays of light -
This is perfected sleep!

Master Chen has taken elaborate precautions to ward his body while his spirit travels, but his practice did not always involve special postures. In this account, "he slept while lying flat on his back." He did not appear to be breathing, but his face was rosy and healthy-looking.

However, he was famous for arranging his body in the Sleeping Tiger position.* There is a cave at the Jade Clear Spring Monastery where he lived his later years, with a statue of him in this classical pose, lying on his right side, right hand supporting the head.

 Chen Tuan also said this:

Superior beings do not dream
They sport with the immortals.
The perfected never sleep
They float up through the clouds.

With our attenuated understanding of what dreaming can be, we must not misunderstand this. Master Chen makes it clear that "great dreams" are the heart of the practice:

Great dreams have great awakening
Small dreams have only small.
Sleep the sleep of all that is perfection
Dream the dreams of wide eternity.

* Sleeping Tiger  You lie on your right side. Your left arm is extended along your left leg. Your right hand may be cupped over your right ear, or tucked under the pillow. The right knee is bent; the left leg is loosely extended. This posture shifts breathing to the left nostril and this is believed to activate right brain activity, facilitating strong visual and intuitive experiences and smoothing the way to states of brainwave activity associated with dreaming or meditation.

This posture is not unique to Daoists; it has been widely adopted and recommended in many dreaming traditions, sometimes as an ideal posture for entering death. The Buddha, at the moment of death, is always depicted in Asian art as lying in the posture of the sleeping tiger.

Source: Biography of Chen Tuan in Lishi zhenshuan tidao tongjiang ("Comprehensive Mirror Through the Ages of of Perfected Immortals and Those Who Embody the Dao") compiled around 1300. translation in Livia Kohn (ed) The Taoist Experience: An Anthology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) pp. 272-6.