· Throughout Chinese literary history, dreams act as harbingers of important messages and as narrative devices that thoroughly confuse the order between reality and imagination. They centre around promises of healing, including sensual bliss, spiritual enlightenment, and the rejuvenation of China.

Johannes D. Kaminski is a scholar of comparative literature, interested in the literature of Chinese modernism, German classicism, and global science fiction. He is a SASPRO2-Fellow at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Lives and Deaths of Werther: Interpretation, Translation and Adaptation in Europe and East Asia (2023).

List of Figures

Preface

1. Philosophical foundations

2. Supernatural dream encounters

3. Tales of the strange

4. Erotic dreams

5. Collective national dreams

Index