Lu You's unique knowledge of poetic genre and dream world, as well as his extensive creative practice, is a key link in the development of ancient Chinese dream-recording literature, and “Night Dreams Can Prove Gongfu” is the summary of his experience. Against the backdrop of the everydayness of Song poetry, Lu You's dreams came down from the immortal world to the earth, and became the “poetic material” for his creations. The construction of cause-and-effect relationship enables the broken dream to form a poetic context integrating narrative, lyricism and argumentation, while the flexible arrangement of title, sequence and syntax allows the expression functions of dream-recording poems to be fully explored. Behind the creation of Lu You's dream-recording poems, the influence of the Gongfu theory advocated by the Jiangxi School is particularly strong: the subject matter of the dream reflects the Gongfu beyond poetry of cultivating righteousness, while the ability to connect the fragments of the dream and even to write poems in the dream reflects the Gongfu within poetry of familiarizing oneself with the syntax of the predecessors. As a result, dreams as poetic material are not only the product of the fusion of Dao and poetic skills, but also the material for the creation of dream-recording poems, which thus became an important type of Lu You's literary creation and had a certain influence on later generations.
Compared with previous studies on Lu You's dream-recording poems, this paper jumps out of the analytical approach of theme first and the research perspective of narrative and psychological interpretation, and returns to the Song concepts of “poetic material” and Gongfu theory, pointing out that these factors deeply influenced Lu You's creation of dream-recording poems and expression strategies, and further contributed to the merging of poems from dreams and dream-recording poems.
This paper adopts the research method of combining bibliography and literature, not only combing and analyzing basic literature of dream-recording poetry and its development trajectory, but also attempting to enrich the knowledge of Southern Song poetics from the perspective of literature. At the same time, it draws on the cutting-edge results of dream science and tries to clarify the theoretical misunderstandings of previous research on dream-recording poems.
Taking Lu You's experience as an entry point, this paper focuses on three dimensions, namely, Lu You's cognition of dreams, the qualities of Lu You's dream-recording poems and their innovative significance, as well as the poetic concepts of Lu You's dream-recording poems, so as to reveal the development of Lu You's dream-recording poems in terms of his writing strategies in comparison with his works in the Northern Song Dynasty, and to prove the significance of his dream-recording poems in the history of literature. It shows that researchers should not only pay attention to ancient literary theories, but also draw theories of ancient literature from writers' works.