The Practice of “Controlled Dreams” in the Alchemical Tradition of Taoism

Abstract

The paper focuses on the Taoist concept of “dreams”, which is considered from the point of view of the meditative practice of “realized dreams” or “controlled visions”. Famous Taoist masters Chen Tuan (10^th cent.), Ma Danyang (12^th cent.), Bai Yuchan (12^th cent.) and many others implemented techniques of “controlled dreams” as a type of meditative alchemical practice: erasing the frontier between sleep and reality, long periods of vigil in a state of “almost sleep” lead to deactualization of the own “ego”. Deliverance from the conventions of the “dream world” leads to the beginning of the mystical transformations inside the body, and the practitioner passes through several stages: to set up breathing, calm consciousness, the beginning of the “copulation” inside the body of two agents (analogs of alchemical lead and mercury), concluding with the formation of a “miracle remedy”. With the control of the spirit-shen, overnight visions were the continuation of the Taoist self-control during the day, while due to various psychosomatic methods, dreams and reality were perceived as a single indistinguishable continuum, and various “lustful desires” were expelled from consciousness. In this regard, the popular idea of a “dream” in Taoist practice, just as a philosophical and aesthetic category, seemed to be too one-sided. The technique of “controlled dreams” did not exist in separation from the general alchemical practice and was rather an additional than the central part of it. Dreams themselves, in other words, the uncontrolled immersion of a person into the world of images and traces of consciousness, at that moment turned into his opposite – a similar, but not identical – in the colossal work of the spirit for the complete transformation into an “immortal”.