Zhuangzi

Daoist thinker, known for the butterfly dream.

Zhuangzi, also written Chuang Tzu, was a Chinese philosopher of the fourth century BC and after Laozi the most important thinker of Taoism. The book that bears his name is full of stories, jokes and paradoxes that invite the reader to let go of fixed certainties. The best-known story is about a dream.

Zhuangzi dreamt that he was a butterfly, fluttering happily about and not knowing he was Zhuangzi. When he woke up, he was unmistakably Zhuangzi again. But he no longer knew: was he Zhuangzi who had dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming it was Zhuangzi? Between Zhuangzi and the butterfly there must be some distinction, says the text: this is called the transformation of things.

The story is one of the most famous texts about dreams ever written. It asks how sure we are that being awake is more real than dreaming. At the same time it is not a gloomy story: the butterfly is happy, and the transformation of one form into another belongs to the course of things, the tao.

Elsewhere in the same book Zhuangzi says that whoever dreams of drinking wine may weep in the morning, and whoever dreams of weeping may go hunting in the morning. Only at the great awakening, he says, do we know that all this was a great dream.

For dream interpretation Zhuangzi is a counterweight to every dream book. Where the dream book of Zhou Gong gives each image a meaning, Zhuangzi asks whether we even know who is dreaming. On Dreamkin both voices stand side by side.