I Had the Dream!

I had a dream last weekend about running (or flying) up and down inside a brick pagoda — probably the one at Guoqing Monastery, in Tiantai. Once I woke up, I quickly jotted down some fleeting memories before they disappeared.

It has been my personal superstition (or fun fact) that whatever topic I am working on needs to come to my dream as a kind of spiritual approval. I gradually developed this dreaming routine during the pandemic, when I was doing my master’s program entirely from home in China, working at the desk right next to my bed. Because of the time difference between China and the UK, I would usually finish classes around 4pm London time and 12am Beijing time, so I would fall straight into sleep within a step from my workstation to my resting zone. It seemed that my brain continued running its own updates while the rest of my body powered down, just like a laptop that secretly installs system updates in the middle of the night.

The more dreams came, the more I realized that every research topic I had worked on eventually appeared in my dreams. Until, that is, I was struggling to settle on my dissertation topic. By the time I needed to write my prospectus, I had accumulated a large body of archival and photographic materials I was interested in, but no thread, no starting point. I was anxious about not being able to decide, and anxious too that the topic hadn’t visited me in my dream yet.

In previous cases, none of those dreams were the prophetic type. They came after I had already spent a long time researching and reading — my brain processing what I’d absorbed. Deciding on a dissertation topic and writing the prospectus is no easy thing, but by week five of the semester, I had finally settled on one (with my advisor’s approval). Then, walking home after that meeting, it hit me: the subject I was going to write my entire dissertation on had actually come to me in a dream before. It was my very first Buddhist-topic dream, back in 2019.

Figure 1: Yang Kyung Soo, 7. Enlightenment and Teaching from Eight Scenes of Buddha’s Life, Buddha, the Hero, 2014, digital print on paper, artist’s website, https://yangkyungsoo.wordpress.com/buddha-works/.

Like the magic of Night at the Museum, where all the museum’s objects come alive after closing time, in my dream, every buddha and bodhisattva in the Dunhuang cave murals escaped out of the walls and threw a party at night (figure. 1). Near dawn, all the divine figures had to return to their places in the murals, and I was the “border control” officer, checking each figure’s “credentials” — their hand gestures, attributes, identifying iconography. Sadly, I woke up because I couldn’t remember the name of one of the hand gestures. I shared the dream with a friend shortly after and cherished it for years. Back then, I was planning to turn it into a piece of fiction: Night at the Buddhist Caves. It was never happened, but 5 years later, I decided to turn it into a phd dissertation.

Fun fact: the cave sites I dreamed about do actually open at night on very special occasions in 2018, and I had the chance to participate in their first-ever (and the only) night tour. Unfortunately, no divine figures came alive. Only hungry mosquitoes, who had perhaps never encountered such a feast in centuries. We were, quite literally, like the Buddha in his previous lives — sacrificing our blood for all hungry beings.

So, after all these personal stories about dreaming my way into research topics, here is the basic framework, which I usually pair with what I call a “library shopping day”:

Pre-requisite: You have already spent some time browsing and exploring a topic or set of materials.

Step 1: Library Shopping Day. Set aside a few designated hours each week to explore a specific area of the library’s shelves. For me, that’s often the Fine Arts Library stacks with the oversized Buddhist cave catalogues. Find a nearby library chart, browse freely, and check out or take notes/photos on whatever catches your attentions.

Step 2: Read, Research, Write Notes. Do the routine things. You know the drill.

Step 3: Keep your brain active before bed. Skim through your jotted notes or scroll through photos you’ve taken from research trips. Give your brain something to chew on.

Step 4: Sleep, and let your brain update on its own. (If you’re worried your brain won’t rest, just wind down with whatever usually helps you sleep.)

As I’ve said, most of the time when topics appear in my dreams, it’s because my brain has been quietly processing them. In the Buddha’s biography, Queen Maya (Śākyamuni Buddha’s mother) dreamed of a white elephant entering her womb from her right side, and afterward discovered she was pregnant. My topics don’t ride white elephants into my dreams. What strikes me instead is the active role I seem to have within them: whether I’m flying up and down inside a pagoda or checking the credentials of buddhas, I’m always an active participant in my dream.

The topics that I dreamed about, of course, always ones I was already very interested in. What the dreaming process does, I think, is offer a second approval from my own subconsciousness and signal that my brain has finished installing its latest update, with all its new security checks and patches in place.

Side note: When I’m drafting this post, I realized how my recent non-academic and semi-academic writing has quietly picked up more ‘digital’ verbs, such as updating, installing, programming. It’s probably a Praxis side effect, perhaps. Soon in the future, I will have a coding dream.