Pro tip: listening to audiobooks of foundational Daoist texts as you fall asleep is a great way to give yourself funky dreams

A few nights ago I fell asleep to the Dao De Jing and ended up having a dream about cuddling a really hunky blind man on a waterbed. I was stargazing and he kept quoting the Dao De Jing to me, and I was like, "Wow, you're so knowledgeable that you can quote that from memory!"

Last night I fell asleep to the Zhuangzi and ended up having a dream about traveling through a forest while narration could be heard from nowhere in particular. Eventually I stumbled upon seven locked doors on the side of the forest path. These doors were not attached to any walls or fences, they were simply freestanding, like you could just walk around them. Each of the seven locked doors bore a colored triangular warning sign representing a bodily orifice — let's say that two of the signs depicted eyes, two depicted ears, two depicted nostrils, and one depicted a mouth, though I figure that the signs were in the dream probably fuzzy and inconsistent.

I saw these seven doors right as the narration explained that Shu, the emperor of the South Sea; and Hu, the emperor of the North Sea; were going to drill seven orifices into Chaos, the emperor of the Central Region, as a way to thank him for his generosity. And so I got to witness each of the seven locked doors slowly get forced open before me, through either crowbar or lockpicking; and with each door opened, I felt myself grow more lethargic.

After I woke up, I thought, "Drilling seven orifices into Chaos, the Emperor of the Central Region? That had to be something I just made up in my dream." — but then I looked it up, and no, that was actually from the Zhuangzi. The part about the doors in the forest was just my dream, but the Zhuangzi does actually contain a story about Shu and Hu drilling seven orifices into Chaos/Hundun until he just dies. It's the last parable of chapter 7, the last of the inner chapters. I guess I'd just forgotten that specific parable since I last read the Zhuangzi many years ago, amid the veritable parade of other surreal anecdotes in that work.

But yeah. Early Daoist texts can get pretty surreal. Truly the Butthole Surfers of the Warring States period. You should check them out. I promise they'll give you a better understanding of dialectics and all.

Edit: Of course I also had a dream in which I was a butterfly, and then when I woke up I wasn't sure if I'd just woken up from that dream about being a butterfly, or if the butterfly was the real me and I'd actually just fallen into a dream about being a human, har har har har har har har [gets vaudeville hooked]