“Dreams, Illusions, Bubbles, Shadows”: Awareness of ‘Unreality’ While Dreaming Among Chinese College Students

Abstract

The recent literature on lucid dreaming (e.g., Purcell et al. 1985) includes some discussion of how to categorize “quasi lucid” states of consciousness, in which dreamers are aware of dreaming but do not control the content of their dreams. Without venturing into the theoretical questions involved, we offer some Chinese data which fall into this category and which suggest a plausible interpretation of such states of consciousness. These data may prove useful to researchers for two reasons. First, nonWestern data of this sort are difficult to locate in the ethnographic literature (cf. Walters & Dentan, 1985), a situation which among other things exacerbates the difficulty of disentangling biological determinants of dreaming tram cultural ones. Second, the process which we propose to interpret the sort of “quasi lucidity” in these Chinese dreams may be more generally prevalent. The accounts are from a corpus (n=67) of dream narratives collected from Chinese college students in Beijing in April and May, 1985.