The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World

From the mid-sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese intellectuals attended more to dreams and dreaming than in any other period of Chinese history. Taking the approach of cultural history, this ambitious yet accessible work aims both to describe the most salient aspects of this “dream arc” and to explain its trajectory in time through the writings, arts, and practices of well-known thinkers, religionists, litterateurs, memoirists, painters, doctors, and political figures of late Ming and early Qing times. The work makes a contribution to the history of how people have understood human consciousness in various times and cultures. GHF supported the open-access version of this book.