An Analysis of Duke Zhou's Science or Superstition
Duke of Zhou is a folk dream interpretation book, which predicts good or bad luck by people's dreams. There are seven interpretations of dreams.
The Duke of Zhou in the book is Zhou Gongdan, and Confucius' dream of "I no longer dream of Duke of Zhou" often appears in Confucianism. Duke Zhou is a frequent figure in Confucius' dreams. In China, where Confucianism has dominated the culture for a long time, Duke Zhou is inevitably directly associated with dreams. Dreams are often called "dreams of Duke Zhou" or "dreams of Duke Zhou".
Dream interpretation is now a science. It adopts the principle of psychodynamics, emphasizes the social and cultural background of dreams and the relationship between dreams and reality, and helps people to deal with and solve inner contradictions and conflicts.
There are many dream stories in ancient China, which are fables rather than dreams of the ancients. Because many of these dream stories are not (or uncertain) dreams, but are fabricated by the ancients to convey ideas, roughly classified, the dream stories in ancient China can be divided into the following categories.
Life is like a dream: represented by the famous dream butterfly story of Zhuang Zhou. This dream is very simple. Zhuang Zhou dreamed that he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he asked a difficult philosophical question: "Did Zhuang Zhou dream that he had become a butterfly, or did the butterfly dream that he had become Zhuang Zhou?" From the phenomenological point of view, we really can't tell which of these two hypotheses is true and which is false.
The ancient dream retrieval theory is unscientific, but this does not mean that ancient dream retrieval is indispensable, because the ancients can intuitively understand the meaning of some dreams in their life experiences, and can also find the meaning of some commonly used symbols, and even some of their dream retrieval methods are in line with psychological principles. But most of them seem fatalistic.
Because of this, such dream-occupying dictionaries often contradict themselves. For example, it is said that "people who dream of snakes and tigers are precious" and "people who dream of snakes in power are lucky", and later it is said that people who dream of snakes are uneasy at home. These explanations of dreams still make sense to some extent. For example, "dreaming that you are blind means that you can't trust your relatives and friends, and you can't trust your wife and children." We know that one of the many meanings of dreaming of blindness really means "trusting others blindly".
What is a dream? Before psychoanalytic theory appeared, the scientific community denied that dreams had any meaning. Of course, the scientific community at that time had an explanation for dreams-it had an explanation for everything. Science is to nature. A systematic interpretation of human and social activities inevitably leaves a blank-the past understanding was that "dreams are irregular activities of brain nerve cells." When people sleep, most nerve cells are inactive and in a state of inhibition, while a few nerve cells are not inhibited and conduct irregular activities. This is a dream. So dreams are meaningless. This is the graffiti of the brain. If you dream of being chased by a dog, it's not interesting. "
Psychoanalysis theory puts forward a new view on dreams, which has been confirmed to some extent by the successful practice of dream interpretation. Psychoanalysis theory points out that there is another hidden meaning under the absurd and meaningless surface of dreams.
So Duke Zhou may not be scientific, but he is not superstitious.