“Dreaming in Inner Mongolia: Northern Rural Chinese Folk Models of Dream Interpretation” by William Jankowiak

About ten years ago I was invited to Singapore to do a dream workshop. All participants were of Chinese descent and the introduction round started by someone saying: “We Chinese don't like dreams.” I have never heard such a clear refusal in the thirty years I have been working with professionals and laymen in what has been called “dreamtelling”. His statement was not refuted by other participants and I kept it in my mind in spite of the workshop ending surprisingly well. Until this day I am curious about the Singapore workshop on “Introduction” to dreams, which obviously represents uncontrolled aspects of our inner life. In the course of the last decade, working with Chinese professionals, whilst I have been witness to a clearly growing interest in dreams, I can often detect this dislike of dreams as a seemingly fundamental “position” towards not only the unconscious but to personal subjectivity in general. Naturally, anti-individual positions take long processes to change, sometimes generations. It took generations to accept Freud (1900a), leading us to transport the dream from its former religious and social space into the realm of the intrapsychic motivations. I think that by making dreams as ultimate voice of the subject, and the dream's interpretation the royal road to the dreamer's psyche, the Western path was set for a less social and more intrapsychic subjectivity.

In the last few years, with the ever-increasing number of Chinese professionals who express the wish to learn how to approach dreaming, and who seem fascinated with working with dreams, maybe we will ultimately see a similar cultural process. I think the Chinese I meet in therapy and supervision groups seem to be on a journey in which they want to separate from a traditional cultural suspicious position towards the world of dreaming. I will discuss further this innovative approach, which seems to me to be the hidden direction of the article.

Of course, suspicion or indifference towards the dream wor