Abstract:

Dream interpretation has a unique charm in the practice of counseling and psychotherapy. Dream is generally considered as the avenue to the kingdom of unconsciousness of human beings, and the best way to learn unconscious contents of an individual. Currently, most domestic practice of dream interpretation is still based on the Western theories and technologies. Despite the progress, this approach is imposed-etic conduction in essence, which means that theories and technologies rooted in Western culture are directly applied to Chinese society, so it lacks intrinsic fitness with the actual situation of Chinese society and culture. Actually, psychological counseling should not be seen as abstraction beyond time and space, but as a historical and cultural phenomenon. Therefore, the localization of the practice of dream interpretation is a critical issue the Chinese dream workers have to confront. As to this issue, the use of Chinese characters in dream interpretation merits our close attention. As a typical representative of hieroglyphics, Chinese characters capture exactly the ethos of traditional Chinese culture. Both traditional dream studies in China and modern dream theories in the West have mentioned the feasibility of the application of Chinese characters in dream interpretation. Nonetheless, those ideas scatter in numerous writings, lack of clear and systematic presentation. To be more specific, traditional Chinese dream statements lack scientific basis, and its specific operation is too arbitrary; while modern Western dream interpretation only observes the association between Chinese characters and dream interpretation without meaningful discussion, nor has it proposed practical procedure -. In the practice of psychological counseling, traditional Chinese culture needs to be interpreted from the aspect of contemporary psychology and to convert the operation, in order to meet the paradigm of psychological discipline. The theory construction of dream interpretation has laid its foundation on Freud and Jung, whose ideas are still the essential guideline for subsequent dream interpretation workers in the innovation of theory and practice. Based on the relevant ideas of Freud and Jung, this paper elaborated the theory construction of Chinese characters in dream interpretation. After a brief review of the application of Chinese characters in traditional Chinese dream theories, this paper discussed four aspects of consistency of the working mechanism between Chinese characters and dreams. Firstly, dreams have the same expository purposes as Chinese characters. In the transformation of dreams, collective unconsciousness makes dreams thought-oriented. In this sense, both dreams and Chinese characters are a channel of mind delivery with certain meanings and aims. Secondly, dreams resemble Chinese characters in the ways of expression. Dreams express unconscious thoughts with symbolic imagery, and Chinese characters express ideas with symbolic written symbols, so dreams have the similar way of expression with Chinese characters. Thirdly, dreams and Chinese characters have a common origin. The originality of image makes itself the common ground for dreams and languages. At last, the formation process of dreams is reciprocal with Chinese characters, which is not from images to ideas but from ideas to images. Based on the analysis above, we can conclude that there is a corresponding relationship between dreams and Chinese characters. While interpreting the dreams of Chinese people, we can obtain inspiration from Chinese characters. Its operative steps are as follows: according to the content and structure of dream images, the dream interpreter finds the Chinese character corresponding to the dream image, and then grasp the thoughts of the dream so as to interpret it. The feasibility of the above steps is mainly based on two facts. Firstly, the dream image is the direct expression of the unconscious thoughts; secondly, the correspondence between dream images and Chinese characters is reliable. What’s more, this paper also demonstrated the explicit operational steps with two cases, so as to show the application of Chinese characters to the interpretation of dreams. In practice, the seeking of Chinese characters corresponding to dream imaginary requires a profound grasp of the historical evolution of Chinese characters, especially early writing structure and original meaning of Chinese characters, which have experienced tremendous changes after long years. Therefore, it should be liberated from simplified characters popularly used nowadays, and be combined with the reexamination of the history of Chinese characters as well as the relative background to get the meaning of dreams. The application of Chinese characters in dream interpretation highlights the characteristics of Chinese characters as ideographic characters, labeling dream interpretation with unique charm of traditional Chinese culture. This also fits in with the requirement of “cultural consciousness” in academic research. The reason lies in the fact that Western writing system belongs to phonogram , while Chinese characters belong to ideogram combining phonetic and graphic features, in which imaginary plays an important role and have more advantages. Thus, Chinese characters can be used in dream interpretation by analyzing ideographic meaning to understand what is hidden in dreams. In summary, employing Chinese characters to interpret the meaning of dreams is useful in the practice of localization of dream interpretation. Chinese characters are of great significance for inspiration and guiding to scientifically understand the essence of the dreams and correctly interpret the dream. Meanwhile, the practice of Chinese characters in dream interpretation also needs to be cautious, because this method is not the only way of interpreting dreams, neither can it be applied to all sorts of dreams. Besides, this application needs a prerequisite that dream workers not only need to master modern technology but also should grasp relative Chinese cultural knowledge. As Freud has said, to what extent we know dreams is only determined by practice and experience, thus the practice of Chinese characters in dream interpretation needs the accumulation of more experience.

Key words: dream interpretation, Chinese characters, localization

摘要：

释梦实践的本土化，是中国释梦工作者自省的关键。中国传统梦学和西方现代释梦理论都提及汉字在释梦工作中的应用，但两者都没有形成系统化的阐述，更没有提出符合现代心理学的操作步骤。在反思传统梦学中汉字释梦的思想后，本文依于现代释梦理论对汉字释梦的可行性进行分析，结果发现梦具有汉字所特有的的两大特征，即以表意性为首要目的，表述方式为象征性表述。基于梦与汉字生成机制的互逆性，本文提出汉字释梦的操作性步骤，即基于梦内容的视觉形象构造，寻找书写结构与此相对应的汉字，再依于汉字的本义把握梦的思想，并结合具体个案进行了展现。总之，以汉字为路径阐释梦的含义是释梦本土化的有益探索。