Study Of The Dream Poetry In Northern Song Dynasty

In the pre-Qin period,dream poems were in the bud and the dream in the poem was often related to divination.The dream poems in the period of two Han dynasties mostly depicted real dreams,especially the lovesick wife-related dream poems were most moving.During the period of Wei,Jin and Southern and Northern dynasties,the dream poems tended to be mature and the content of the dreams expanded,with the main themes of“homesickness” and “missing relatives”.The dream poems in the Tang dynasty continued the themes of the Wei and Jin dynasties,and there were also some works about immortals,when the poetic art writing was already relatively mature.The dream poems in the Northern Song dynasty developed in a broad and deep direction on the basis of the previous dream poems,and the dream poems in the early Northern Song dynasty were with the aftertaste of those in the Tang dynasty.The dream poems in the middle and late period yielded unusually brilliant results,highlighting the development process of “Song style” from germination to finalization.The dream poems in the late period were with the characteristics of the scholarly room and the feeling of sorrow and indignation of subjugation.From the perspective of poem content,there were three types of dream poems in the Northern Song dynasty,which are dream-memory poem,symbolized dream and dream-inspired poem,respectively.The dream-memory poem focuses on recording the dreamland,with “sleepwalking”,“missing relatives”,“dreaming of versifying” and“dreaming of strange things” as the main themes,presenting the different dreams containing lofty sentiments,tender feelings and treacherousness.The symbolized dream refers to the allusion dream after being artistically processed by the poet,which has both the core of the original allusion and the poet’s personal emotional experience.The common symbolized dreams in the Northern Song dynasty include butterfly dream,pipe dream,spring grass and pond dream and Huaxu dream.The dream-inspired poem indicates the poetry composed by the poet under the inspiration of dreams,in which there are the dreaming feelings,the sentiments about “life is like a dream” and the discrimination between “dream” and “sleep”,full of the thinking of the poet.The content of the dream poems in the Northern Song dynasty was diversified with more poetry materials.Meanwhile,the typical themes of the dream poems in the Northern Song dynasty were also expanded.The typical themes of the dream poems in the previous dynasty were “homesickness” and “missing relatives”,while those in the Northern Song dynasty became “homesickness”,“politics”,“seclusion” and“immortals”.From the perspective of creation,the new changes in the dream poems of the Northern Song dynasty lie in the narrativity,ordinariness and attention to time and space.The dream poems in the previous dynasty were mainly lyrical,while those in the Northern Song dynasty were both lyrical and documentary,which reflected the unique narrative characteristics of Song poems in terms of the topic,poetic preface,self-note and poem suite.The attention of the Song people to their daily life also made a large number of literati trifles appear in the dream poems of the Northern Song dynasty;thus,they are with the characteristic of ordinariness.The dream poems in the Northern Song dynasty mostly adopted the technique of condensing time and crossing space and the poets took the dream as the medium to break through the time and space,which is conducive to the development and transmission of the poetic emotion.The poets in the Northern Song dynasty made full use of the uniqueness and privacy of dreams,and there were obvious differences in the poems of poets of different identities.The dream poems of civil officials,poor scholars and literati,monks and recluses are with their own characteristics.For the poets of the Northern Song dynasty,dream was not only the content of poetry and the driving force of creation,but also an important artistic technique in poetry.