The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World

An event description I quite liked:

“The mid-sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth century saw a notable efflorescence in attention to dreams and dreaming among Chinese intellectuals and constituted a distinct phase in the long history of Chinese ‘dream culture.’ The reasons for this are intimately related to virtually every trend — in philosophy, religion, the literary arts, examination competition, politics, and the fate of the country — that affected the subjective consciousness of literati during the late Ming. This efflorescence was carried into the very early Qing period by survivors of the Ming collapse but petered out when the ‘conquest generation’ passed away. It lost salience with the decline of the cultural matrix that uniquely identifies the late Ming, but it sent certain significant influences onward into the middle Qing period.”