The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine and the interpretation of typical dreams two millennia ago

Abstract

Dream content is perhaps not as elusive as it appears to be. Contemporary research shows that there are typical dream themes that are shared by people from different cultures, across different time periods. Indeed, Sigmund Freud has already observed and interpreted these dream themes more than a century ago. If typical dream themes cross both cultural and time boundaries such that people in the 21st century dream the same themes as did people in the 20th and 19th centuries, can they be traced even further back in time to ancient China—namely, before Christ? This implies that typical dream themes pass down from generations to generations without being eliminated despite the dramatic evolution of humanity. The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine (Huang-di Nei-jing; 黃帝內經) was written between the late Warring States period (475–221 BC) and the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) when Chinese philosophy began and many time-honored schools of thought blossomed. Huang-di Nei-jing is the first and also the most important text throughout the history of Chinese medicine; it is still a must-read for Chinese medical practitioners nowadays. This article reviews how the narrative content of dreams is interpreted in ancient China and compares the dream themes illustrated in Huang-di Nei-jing with those typical dream themes enumerated by Freud and contemporary researchers. A 3-tier model of dream expression is put forward in light of the theoretical implications of Huang-di Nei-jing for understanding the formation of dream content. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)