Self reconfigured in recollected dreams: Xue cai's (1595-1665) journal during the manchu conquest of China

Xue Cai, a retired scholar-official of the late Ming, kept a journal between the spring of 1642 and the third month of 1646, in which he reflected on his personal choice of seeking refuge in the mountains in the wake of the Manchu conquest of China. He also recorded a total of forty-four dreams that are focused on his own subjective experience, in which he cast his agitated mind and deteriorating consciousness as an integral part of local (and in his case personal) breakdown of order during and after the Manchu conquest. Recalled to memory and expressed through language of extreme evocative power, these dreams exhibit a far richer range of emotions than those expressed by the author during waking hours. Guilt, fear, anxiety, and embarrassment reveal an emotional negativity that is ill-defined and less object-or goal-directed than his daytime narratives. Recollection through dreams, while less fleshed out as narrative and seemingly confused and random in their procession through time and space, can illuminate in a different way how these negative emotions are structured by oneiric experience. By examining ways in which these subjective expressions are staged, we may come closer to understanding the range of pressures brought to bear on the literati experience of the Manchu conquest. Dreams bring the past unbidden and unformulated into present consciousness and, in the manner they relate the experiences of the body in that state, expose subjective layers that are laid down as important deposits in the deep sedimentation of conscious and unconscious recollection of the trauma of conquest.