Robert Ford Campany is Professor of Asian and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is author of Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China and Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China.
While the book is written for an academic audience, the writing is
wonderfully engaging. In the end, it challenges us to revisit our
assumptions about dreams: what can and cannot be known about them
and how much is a product of cultural context.
*Asian Review of Books*
[Campany’s] approach to the study of Chinese dreams and dreaming is
expansive without falling into the comfortable universals afforded
by the perennialism that often creeps into modern studies on
dreams. In fact, Campany takes issue with all ‘isms.’ According to
Campany, the reification of traditions into monolithic belief
systems (e.g., ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Daoism’) only muddies our
understanding of these traditions, diverting our attention away
from the plurality of information that makes up complex cultural
phenomena such as dreams and beliefs. While the book sometimes
dwells too long on the critical theory underpinning it, these
theoretical forays are for the most part done to great effect. This
book is a big and much-needed step forward not only in the study of
dreams and dreaming in China but also, more generally, in the
fields of religious studies and social history.
*Religious Studies Review*
[The Chinese Dreamscape] delivers an admirable synthesis of past
and present oneirological research, in the Chinese context and
cross-culturally, while also presenting a compelling new
application of the analytical toolkit that Campany has been honing
over his last 25 years of scholarship (such as notions of
cosmography, discourse communities, and the performative and
semiotic functions of storytelling). Moreover, the author’s
recognition of dreaming as an embodied process, and of the complex,
recursive interactions between dreams, bodies, and cultures,
clearly informed his decision to cite relevant theories and
examples from across the social scientific corpus (e.g.
anthropology, history, psychology). This resulted in a laudably
interdisciplinary study, equally relevant to sinologists and
oneirologists.
*Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies*
Dreamscape makes major contributions to the field…[It] provides an
unparalleled assortment of many facets of dream life; we see
sophisticated taxonomies, dream analyses (based variously on
wordplay, spoken and written; hexagrams from the Book of Changes;
and Chinese medicine), and extensive translations of biographies of
elite diviners…‘Seminal’ long ago became an overused
characterization in academic book reviews, but one can easily see
this work, the product of many years of research, inspiring many
future studies to further investigate this fascinating, vital
subject.
*History of Religions*
Campany has given us an immensely perceptive, rich, and dense study
that will leave its readers with sharpened sensibilities for
interpreting dream-related passages in Chinese literature.
*Tang Studies*
Should prove invaluable to scholars interested in traditional
Chinese literature and culture as well as comparative studies as
diverse as psychology, theology, and literature.
*Journal of Chinese Studies*
Campany’s sixth book, The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE,
builds on materials, themes, and arguments that Campany has been
exploring over his previous five in expanding our understanding of
early medieval Chinese religious worlds. Chinese Dreamscape is just
as generously spirited, combing through scholarship external to
Sinology and religious studies for relevant comparative cases and
methodological insights, and then devising novel frameworks for his
readers to better elucidate phenomena in their own fields of study,
Asian religious traditions or otherwise. It is always pleasurable
to consume Campany’s unique scholarly voice—at turns cautiously
exhaustive, insistently clear, and playfully poetic—for the space
of another book. And Chinese Dreamscape might also represent
Campany at an especially self-reflexive moment, as the uncanny
nature of dreams themselves continually challenge human attempts to
render them sensible. We witness the author in the act of growing
and reshuffling his theoretical repertoire to better capture the
foreignness of the beings early Chinese people met when they were
asleep.
*H-Net Reviews*
This is not a subject that many have written about – nor one that
immediately suggests the range and depth of material that the
author has succeeded in finding. That Campany has been able to
describe consistent patterns of interpretation and approach across
such an extended period is as much as tribute to his own
scholarship as it is to the remarkable extent of classical Chinese
texts that still exist today.
*Kerry Brown Reviews*
Campany has given us an immensely perceptive, rich, and dense study
that will leave its readers with sharpened sensibilities for
inter¬preting dream-related passages in Chinese literature. I am
already looking forward to reading the second volume and to
detecting the traces this book is bound to leave in future
scholarship of early and medieval China literature and culture.
*Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies*
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