Qu Yuan's Plaintive Lines and the Dream Literature

Qu Yuan's Plaintive Lines is a rhyme-prose work whose whole space is used to record a dream. In the Chinese classics of the axial period, there are three ways in which dreams are recorded, namely, administrative rules, parables, and rhyme-prose works. Duke Zhou's Explanations of Dreams Newly Collected, a Dunhuang scroll, the Zhuangzi, and the Plaintive Lines are historical documents representative of these three dream-recording ways. And in these three ways the rhyme-prose is of the most highly literariness. In Qu Yuan's rhyme-prose works, the Plaintive Lines is a considerable long piece, in which religious and narrative properties are melted perfectly into one whole. It records many gods, such as God on High (Heaven), Five Emperors, Six Gods and the Li-God. The status of Li-God is the explainer of dreams. Plaintive Lines and the Sorrow of Departure accord with each other in their style, which is the sublime, or, the grandiose. From the angle of geneology, the Plaintive Lines belongs to the rhyme-prose, a genre with a narrative line to which many other beautiful qualities may to attached. The existence of Plaintive Lines shows that the Chinese dream is of inner historical sources. China is after all the fountainhead of man's good dreams.