On The Depiction Of Dreams In Chinese Traditional Opera

This article takes the depiction of dreams in Chinese traditional opera as the research objective. For the convenience of the study, this article divides numerous dreams involved in plays into efficacious dreams and illusory dreams. As to the efficacious dreams, this article mainly analyzes the dreams which can help to solve the cases in plays of detachment and dreams of marriage in the love plays. In this sort of dreams, the characters never doubt about their reality, for the life in the dreams syncretizes with the life in the plays. The dream is treated as a key point which merges with the thread of the story as it proceeds. For the illusory dreams, the article probes into dreams of immortal detaching, dreams of scholars'consciousness and dreams of marriage and love which may never really come true. In such kind of dreams, the relation between the life in dreams and the life in plays is contrastive and comparative which be best described as the two sides of the mirror effects, on one hand reflecting the shadowland in actual life and on the other hand the dreamers'emotion and interior world. It is hoped that this kind of classification contributes not only to the understanding of the cultural meaning and aesthetic value of the dream depiction, but also to the comprehending of the essential reason why there are so many dreams containing in Chinese opera.On the basis of above classification, this article studies the phenomenon from two aspects, the cultural background and the dramatic essence. In view of cultural background, the psychology of the worship towards the dream in Chinese culture is described orderly, and the influence of"Bi Xing"(a kind of thinking mode in classical literature) to the play writing is also analyzed. From the angle of dramatic essence, this article discusses the object in two ways respectively,"the resemblance of dream and opera"and"the accommodative opera". In the first part, the author proves the resemblance between dream and opera in aspects of"fabled characteristic"and"exhibition form". In the second part, how the opera provides important factors for"dream's performance"is discussed from two sides, special spatio-temporal structure in Chinese opera and unique aesthetic rule which shows tolerance and preference to fantastic plot.