Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 Bce-800 Ce Campany Robert Ford

Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable--in a word, strange. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams.

Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience?In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE-800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines.