The Book of the Five Dynasties records that a person from Luo Yang named Wang Chu Na dreamed that a man cut open his stomach and placed inside it a huge mirror inscribed with the constellations. He was so surprised that he awoke covered with perspiration.

A month later he still felt pain in his stomach.

However, from that day forward he became interested in the stars and in his later life became a great astronomer.

SOURCE: The Interpretation of Dreams in Chinese Culture by Fang Jing Pei and Zhang Juwen (2000) pp. 109. DATE: a guess, from a bare Wikipedia mention of Wang Chuna as publishing his lifework in 963, and as senior to another astronomer born c.910.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Chinese oneirology is full of career-advice or career-predicting dreams. I chose a mad-surgery example partly because it tweaks the Jungian idea that the unconscious only cares about emotional and spiritual matters, not, say, careers in science.

But also... confession time! I recently had such a career-advice-surgery dream myself. A surgeon implanted in my belly a sort of port or charging station for magical remote-sensing familiars! Like a mystical hummingbird feeder. I even met the familiars--little bird-girls-spirits called flannan, fast as swallows and eager to go exploring. The doctor said "Be patient--it'll take a while to heal up and function. But the surgery went well."

So, see, now I have to be a dream-shaman. And I had my heart set on stockbroking! Waaaah...

They aren't all as direct as this star-mirror. But the Chinese corpus has dozens of career-dreams that are pretty darn blatant.

So if you have one, no matter how weird, don't let a therapist or dream manual explain it away as wishful thinking or compensation! What if it's a prompt? Maybe you can be... stellar.

--Chris Wayan

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