Sleep in Dream: Soporific Responses to Depression in Story of the Stone
by Victor H. Mair
With each rereading of Dream of the Red Chamber, I become more and more impressed by the enormous number of references to sleep in it. Some word for resting in bed or sleeping occurs, on the average, on more than half the pages of the book. I know of no parallel to this in Chinese narrative literature and would be hard pressed to name another work in all of world literature that is so preoccupied with the subject. It is impossible that the apparent ubiquity of sleep in the novel could be purely fortuitous. There must be some fundamentally important reason why Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in and his collaborator dwelt upon sleep and its variants so insistently. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the function of the sleep motif in Dream of the Red Chamber and to examine its significance for the overall meaning of the novel.
This paper was originally written for the Summer Workshop on The Dream of the Red Chamber, held June 16-20, 1980 at Madison, Wisconsin. It was prepared without benefit of computers, electronic data bases, or indices of any sort. The organizer of the conference had kindly offered to publish this little essay in the conference volume, but for years I heard no news from Madison. Eventually (perhaps a decade after the conference), I did hear a rumor that the Chinese papers for the conference had been published in a volume from Hong Kong, and that the conference organizer was still looking for a publisher for the English papers. Another decade passed, and my manuscript gradually became buried under a mass of other books, articles, and teaching materials in my office. It was only this spring (2004), while moving back into my office after a year of renovations and having to go through every single book and folder, that I unexpectedly excavated this old paper. Pleasantly surprised, I reacquainted myself with this product of half-a-year's research as an assistant professor and came to the conclusion that it might, after all, still be worth sharing with colleagues. Having waited for nearly a quarter century for word from the conference organizer about the fate of the English volume, I fear that I never will. Therefore, before he and I both enter the repose that never ends, I wish to take advantage of this opportunity to thank him for inviting me to the conference and hope that he will not mind that I now make bold to publish "Sleep in Dream" in this humble series.
In actuality, sleep does not simply have a single function in the novel. It is seen to have many different aspects and purposes. One character goes to bed because he or she is ill, another avoids going to bed because he or she wishes to avoid becoming ill. A nanny may order her young charge to bed to keep him out of trouble. An old lady may take a nap because she is bored or listless. A maiden may loll about in bed because she feels that, in this manner, she might attract the attention of Pao-yü. Sleep is also employed as a narrative technique to indicate the passage of time. And so on.
By far the most significant role for sleep in Dream of the Red Chamber, however, is derived from its conception as the best way to cope with depression. So pervasive, in fact, are the correspondences between sleep and depression in the novel that we must recognize these two phenomena as conjoined elements in a single psychological semeiology. Investigation of Western psychiatric categories has revealed, indeed, that Tai-yü is a classical instance of a person suffering from severe depression. Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in's description of Tai-yü's behavior (and, to a lesser extent, of that of many other characters in the novel) agrees remarkably well with the categories of symptoms for chronically depressed individuals described in modern psychiatric literature.
In order to understand better the functions of sleep in Dream, we may begin with a brief inquiry into depression as it is viewed by modern Western psychology. By way of preface to this inquiry, the potential fallacy of such an approach needs to be pointed out so that psychology is indeed used to illuminate the novel rather than vice versa. We should not for a moment delude ourselves into thinking that Tstao Hsüeh-ch'in or his collaborator had any knowledge of this medical category. It is, furthermore, highly unlikely that contemporary Chinese physicians would have conceived of depression in terms consonant with modern Western psychology. My colleague, Nathan Sivin, has kindly made a survey of several early Chinese texts dealing with the etiology of diseases and has come to the tentative conclusion that fan-men 煩悶 (depression) does seem to have become a common word in the medical literature between the Sui and the mid-Sung periods. It appears, however, to be viewed as a symptom rather than a specific disorder itself. There is a particular emphasis in the literature on the occurrence of depression in connection with various disorders relating to childbirth. This emphasis on pre- and postpartum complications is not surprising, however, because that was a major focus of medical attention to women.
Depression may be broadly defined as an emotional state characterized by sadness, inactivity, self-depreciation, introversion, and decreased initiative. Hippocrates (460?-?377 Before International Era) referred to it as melancholia and Aretaeus (fl. 1st-2nd c. B.I.E.), later recognized a similar set of symptoms as constituting an identifiable illness. But it was not until 1883 that Emil Kraepelin first formally described depression in terms that are more or less accepted by psychiatrists and psychologists today. Only recently (in the past few decades) has chronic depression been given much serious attention by medical practitioners and that primarily among professional women in America.
In relatively mild cases, the depressed individual appears to be generally unhappy, pessimistic, and inhibited. Here we may speak of dejection and despondency which are frequent initial reactions to a sense of loss. The patient feels increasingly listless and inadequate and she also becomes more quarrelsome and preoccupied with her own problems. Readers of Dream of the Red Chamber will instantly recognize that this is essentially a clinical description of the path of Tai-yü's neurosis before she succumbs entirely to the depradations of somatic disease. It would be difficult to conceive of a more irritable and self-centered person than Tai-yü, especially after chapter fifty-six.
A group of psychiatrists studying chronic depression recently listed eight symptoms to measure this type of disorder (not all need be present at the same time):
- loss of appetite or weight loss
- sleep difficulties including hypersomnia
- fatigue
- agitation or retardation
- loss of interest
- difficulty in concentration
- feelings of guilt
- thought of suicide or wishing to be dead
Many of the characters in Dream display one or more of these symptoms. Accordingly, we may diagnose them as suffering from depression to one degree or another.
It is the second of these eight symptoms that is especially relevant to the present study. Individuals suffering from depression complain of a disruption of normal sleeping patterns. In many cases, insomnia is persistent but there are also reports of patients who sleep and nap more during bouts of depression. Each of these types is represented in Dream. But what is more noteworthy, both in terms of modern clinical observation and as portrayed in Dream, is that the depressed person tends generally to spend much more time sitting or lying about by herself. Whether she is actually asleep (neurologically speaking) seems ultimately to be of less significance than the immobility which results from loss of initiative. Hence, the depressed person is isolated and withdrawn, prefers to remain by herself, and stays in bed much of the time.
Having established the basic symptoms of depression as it is viewed by psychologists and psychiatrists, we may now turn to an examination of specific examples of this disorder in Dream. But, before doing so, we must first discuss the terminology involved.
The word for "depression" in Chinese is men 悶. The meanings of men range from oppressive, stifling, stuffy, and suffocating to depressed, low-spirited, melancholy, and bored. It may also be used to signify the suppression of feelings or emotion. The basic import of the word seems to center around the idea of something weighing down or upon an individual that he is incapable of dispelling. Men occurs singly and in such combinations as fan-men 煩悶, na-men 納悶, ch'ou-men 愁悶, yu-men 憂悶, fa-men 發悶, men-men 悶悶, men-ssu 悶死, (men "to death"!), men-chiu 悶酒, men-te-huang/hen 悶得慌/很, and men-ch'i 悶氣 (all of these expressions, and many others in addition, occur in Dream). The last expression is particularly revealing (because it includes the character ch'i 氣 (literally "air" or "breath" but, as a philosophical and medical term, " configurational energy" is a more serviceable rendering, cf. Gk. pneuma, Skt. prana).
As delineated in Dream, depression is a result of the dislocation or, more accurately, stifling of the flow of configurational energy through the various "organs" (orbes) and channels (sinarteriae) of the body. Viewed in this fashion, agitation, vexation, and anger may very easily shift to melancholy and despondency for all are derangements of configurational energy. The same sort of shift is recognized by modern psychiatry as with manic depressive psychosis. When faced with any of these conditions, the individual (frequently with the help of his friends, relatives, and doctors) tries to restore the proper balance of configurational energy (ch'i) throughout the body. But he may very well over-react and it is for this reason that anger can turn to depression. The latter condition tends to be self-sustaining while the former often runs its own course. As a result, the angry individual usually returns fairly soon to normalcy (or depression if the dimunition of the circulation of ch'i is too sudden or pronounced) while the depressed person tends to remain that way for lengthy periods.
Furthermore, his condition often steadily deteriorates until he becomes morose or even catatonic and, in extreme cases, dies. Once the patient perceives his situation to be hopeless, unless proper treatment is provided, the resultant helplessness becomes irreversible and ultimately leads to death.
Since the thesis of this paper is that sleep and depression go hand-in-hand in Dream, we must now examine words designating sleep. There are many different words to indicate diverse forms of sleep or lying in bed that are used in Dream, among them: shui 睡, mien 眠, tao 倒, mei, ch'in 寢, t'ang 躺, wo 臥, yang 仰, hsi 息, hsieh 歇, tun 盹, and wai 歪. The approximate meanings of these terms (and combinations thereof) may by found in the appendix. In general, statements in this paper concerning sleep are based on references in Dream to any of the above or related activities. The border between sleeping and waking in the novel is often very unclear, as we shall see, so that shui may mean variously "lie in bed," "rest," "doze," "sleep," and so forth. This lack of precision is understandable when we examine a standard dictionary e.g. Ocean of Phrases (Tz'u-hai 辭海), and find that shui is defined as ch'in, ch'in as wo, and so forth. But this imprecision in terminology presents no insuperable difficulty for our analysis because it is nearly always possible to surmise from the context the appropriate neurological state.
We are now in a position to run seriatim through a group of examples that have been chosen to elucidate the connection between sleep and depression in Dream of the Red Chamber. Most of the examples cited are from the first and third forty chapters of the novel because references to sleep and depression are more prominent in them than in the middle forty chapters.