Dreams as Life and Life as Dreams in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century xiaoshuo Narratives

In the depiction and analysis of various transtextual sources and rewritings, this article discusses narratives of Chinese late imperial xiaoshuo that dealt with dreams perceived as equally important if not more valuable than waking life itself. The discourse of these dream stories aimed at underlining the significance of the value granted to dreams, and consequently how this perspective on dreams could affect one’s stance towards life itself. With an emphasis on the eighteenth century, examples comprise narratives from lesser-known collections, such as Xieduo 諧鐸 by Shen Qifeng (1740?–?), but the author also highlights earlier texts—Daoist classics, chuanqi 傳奇 of the Tang, and chuanqi of the Ming—which served as sources for these late imperial tales. Although the theme of life-long dreams is found across the centuries and literary genres, this article points to its various treatments, that differed according to time periods and authors’ personal concerns. It highlights a shift in “life-long dream” stories of the late imperial period towards a concern for private matters, depicted in a detached and/or light-hearted tone.

Zoufalství, jaderné rakety a magické hory. Uchronický příběh bývalého vojáka základní služby

The text follows the post-cultural turn oral history paradigm, as expressed in concepts of Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, and others. It also makes use of the “dream stories” (Traumgeschichten) research by Reinhart Koselleck, to discover and interpret the cultural processes and forms related to the problematic historical subjectivity of an ex-Czechoslovak People’s Army conscript. The main historical source is the recorded oral-history narrative of a person, whose compulsory military service (1975–1977) led to a decidedly negative turn in his life. The narrator attempted to treat his shaken historical subjectivity through the creative construction of an elaborate uchronic story, merging his own military experience with motifs of imaginary service in units armed with nuclear weapons, with contemporary legends dealing with similar topics, and with older cultural strata, highlighting the phenomenon of “magical mountains” and apocalyptic military prophecies.

On the Problem of Contacts of the Living with the Deceased: How the Deceased Protect Themselves from the Living

This article is based on field data from the Russian North. Its subject is the problem of the relationship between the living and the deceased. The main goal of the article is to show how dream stories transform the Russian peasants’ idea idea that deceased persons can visit their living kin in order to continue their family life together, including sexual relations. This mythological plot, which often causes real fear among people who have lost relatives, is mirrored in dream stories. On the one hand, the appearance of the deceased in a dream is associated with the expectation of the dreamer’s imminent death. On the other, stories are recorded about dreams where the deceased husband refuses to take his wife with him to the world of the dead or even tries to get rid of her. The reluctance of the deceased to take his living relative with him can be explained by the desire to preserve the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead. For protection from the living, the deceased use the same strategies as do the living to protect themselves against the dead relatives when they come. These strategies include: 1) escape (upon seeing a living relative, the dead goes away); 2) declaring the absence of suitable housing (the deceased husband has nowhere to bring his wife); 3) expulsion with the help of aggression, primarily obscene swearing.

Dreams of Destiny and Omens of Greatness: Exceptionalism in Ottoman Political and Historical Thought

This article uses dreams, portents, and prognostications as an entry point into what some scholars have recently called ‘Ottoman exceptionalism’. Drawing on sources in Turkish and Arabic, it traces beliefs about the Ottoman dynasty and empire’s superiority, divine favour, and special role in history from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. I begin with the ‘seeds’ of the topic in the empire’s early years and myths of origin, including a number of dream stories, before moving to full-scale political exceptionalism. Looking closer, I then identify an eschatological strand in the lead-up to the Islamic millennium that centred on the dynasty’s role in the end time. The millennium’s uneventful passing led to the dissolution of this strand but not of ideas about exceptionalism itself, which in later forms turned inward, depicting the empire as ‘eternal’ and projecting its rule to an undetermined future period.

Allegories of Poetic Translation in Yves Bonnefoy's 'Dream Stories'

Translation is an essential part of Yves Bonnefoy's work. But his originality in this field lies in the critical studies that have regularly accompanied his translations and in his reflection on the act of translation, developed in various essays and interviews. Departing from his conception of translation as a poetic activity, based on the distinction between the ‘translation of meanings’ and the ‘translation of the essence’, we approach the analysis of two poetic short stories, ‘Première ébauche d’une mise en scène d’Hamlet’, and ‘Hamlet en montagne’ included in L’heure présente (2011), which we approach both as ‘translations in a broad sense’, according to the definition proposed by the poet, as a prolongation and deepening of the understanding of the text through poetic writing, and as allegorical fictions of the process of translation.

Dreams from Beyond as Politics from Below

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul in 2015, this article traces how certain people within the Hizmet community drew on dream stories to understand and manoeuvre within the escalating falling-out with the AKP government. It suggests that, in this context, dream stories were circulated within the community to reframe the conflict against the horizon of the afterlife but prevented from spilling into the wider public sphere out of fear that Hizmet critics would use dream stories to denounce the community as a threat to Turkish republican tradition. The article thus proposes to see the social life of dream stories as a ‘politics from below’ through which relations between the religious and the political refracted and notions of national and religious belonging were negotiated and contested.