Dreams and the world of dreams

Dreams and the world of dreams are presented as more than private nighttime images: in Rong Jinzhen’s notebook they become a way of thinking about knowledge, memory, illness, and the limits of waking consciousness. Dreams may contain secrets and make extraordinary perception possible, yet they also drain the dreamer, bring the past back into the mind, and threaten to consume the boundary between rest and wakefulness. The notebook does not settle these contradictions; it returns to them in brief declarations, recurring images, and dreams nested inside other dreams.

A world of knowledge and danger

The notebook treats dreaming as a condition with its own unsettling logic. One entry calls sleep exhausting because it requires dreaming; another turns the claim around, describing idleness as exhausting because an empty mind gives the past room to break in. Work, in this account, can help a person forget the past and even relinquish the reason for forgetting. Dreams are thus not simply a retreat from waking life. They are a route by which what has been left behind can return, especially when ordinary activity no longer occupies the mind.

At the same time, the dream world is represented as a storehouse of knowledge. The notebook declares that the world’s secrets are held in dreams, and that formulation grants dreams a reach beyond an individual’s private experience. It also describes the dream realm as a source of contamination: people have dealt with it since childhood and, the entry suggests, have been affected by the wickedness and evil encountered there. That unsettling inheritance is linked to an extraordinary capacity to catch a bird in mid-flight. The image makes perception both a gift and a consequence of exposure to a troubling world; what allows someone to seize the elusive may also mark them as touched by what lies beyond ordinary waking life.

Nested dreams and elusive books

The notebook repeatedly unsettles the distinction between a dream and the world inside it. When the location of a book becomes a question, the answer places it first in a dream and then more precisely in a dream within a dream, in the mind of an imaginary Klaus Johannes. The book is not simply lost in physical space: it is placed at a further remove, inside an invented person’s imagined interior. This progression makes the search itself a passage through layers of consciousness, while withholding any stable point from which the object can be recovered.

Other entries give the dream world a more concrete but no less unstable form. In one dream, Rong Jinzhen wades waist-deep in a river while reading a book with no words. As the water surges and swirls, he holds the book above his head to keep it dry; when the current has passed, he discovers that it has carried away his clothes and left him naked in the river. The scene joins reading, exposure, and loss without explaining them away. The book remains protected, but the dreamer’s own covering does not. Elsewhere, he dreams two dreams simultaneously, one above and one below, an arrangement that makes the mind seem to occupy competing levels at once. The notebook also proposes that every person’s dream has already been dreamed by everyone else, extending the private dream into a shared and repetitive human territory.

Dreaming as illness

The notebook gives dreaming a bodily and clinical dimension as well. Its speaker records a doctor’s warning that dreaming damages health and is itself a sickness. Another entry distinguishes two kinds of sickness: one causes mainly pain and can be treated with medicine; the other makes a person dream and also has a medicine, but that medicine is found in dreams. The first illness may pass quickly, while the second burns the sufferer up. The paradox is central: the dream is both the affliction and the place where its remedy must be sought.

This language appears alongside the book’s accounts of Rong Jinzhen’s physical illnesses, but the evidence does not make those conditions identical to his dreams. Earlier, renal failure left him gravely ill, hospitalized for close on two years, and required severe restrictions on salt during his recovery. In 1966, a stomach problem caused him to lose consciousness after breakfast and led to another hospital admission. These episodes establish that bodily illness and treatment are part of his story; the notebook’s claims about dreams give illness a separate, inward dimension. Its imagery of exhaustion and being burned up makes that inward affliction consequential without reducing the dream world to a medical diagnosis.

Repetition, exhaustion, and waking

The dream entries often arrive as short, numbered fragments rather than as a continuous account. Their abrupt assertions and incomplete images make the reader assemble relations among dreaming, memory, knowledge, and sickness. A dream can hide a book inside another mind, expose the dreamer to loss, or carry knowledge unavailable in waking life; it can also leave him worn down. After one dream, the notebook says that its experience made him wake exhausted, as though the dream had boiled him down to the dregs. The image gives the cost of dreaming a bodily force, complementing the more abstract description of the dream illness that burns its sufferer up.

The notebook’s closing commands pull in opposite directions: one calls for waking, while another resists waking. Neither cancels the other. Together they leave the dreamer suspended between the need to escape the dream and the need to remain within it, where secrets and remedies may be found. Dreams and the world of dreams therefore organize a persistent tension in Rong Jinzhen’s writing: they promise access to what cannot otherwise be known, but that access exacts a price in fatigue, vulnerability, and uncertainty about where waking life ends.