Chapter 12: Butterfly Dream
It was a peculiar sensation. How did slumbering souls discern their dream state? Anji typically traversed dreams unaware until rousing from slumber. Yet, this day unfolded differently. The young princess held firm knowledge of her dream-bound state. Certainty enveloped her awareness.
"Where am I?" she tried to recall what she was doing before falling asleep but could not remember anything.
The dream world Anji found herself in was a vast expanse of darkness, like an endless pool of ink. It was disorienting, like being blindfolded in a pitch-black room. She couldn't tell if she was standing or floating, up or down. Everything was the same, and yet, everything was different.
Was this what Zhuangzi, the philosopher, meant in his poem of the Butterfly Dream?
Anji furrowed her brow, delving deep into the recesses of her memory in search of a poem her scholarly second brother once recited. Initially, she dismissed it as useless nonsense. Zhao Mingshen's discourse often veered into the realm of profundity, leaving practicality behind. He would do many strange things that martial artists and cultivators thought were excessive and unnecessary. After all, no cultivator was interested in writing poems. If they had to write, it would be a letter, report or cultivation manual.
Yet, Mingshen was a beacon of wisdom and sagacity in her eyes. He was the only person who took a two-year-old's request to study seriously and introduced Anji to the world of brushstrokes and characters. It was Mingshen who patiently guided her hand with a brush to teach her how to write her name. To teach Anji how to read, he spent many nights under the candlelight drawing pictures with their correlated words, binding them into a picture book so she could study easily when he was busy training during the day. Although they only had about an hour each day for a year, Mingshen taught Anji everything she knew about books. Unbeknownst to their parents, Mingshen was her first calligraphy and etiquette teacher, a bond as strong as the ink on the pages of their books.
While many children would falter at characters exceeding five strokes, Anji proved to be a quick study. After a good night's rest, she etched every word taught by Mingshen into her mind. After a year, she amassed enough knowledge to navigate the pages of a dictionary. Her brother was proud of her and deemed that Anji no longer needed his help. She was later permitted to spend most of her time alone in the library, which was exactly what Anji did.
In The Butterfly Dream, Anji recalls Mingshen explaining how fickle the line between reality and illusion is. On top of that, it was easy for many people to lose sight of who they were. Without a strong and clear identity, breaking out of an illusion was impossible. The word 'identity' originated from the phrase "I define my entity." Was this a trial?
Bored and miserable in this empty space without a sense of time, Anji decided to experiment. Perhaps she would wake up if she screamed loud enough or wriggled with all her might.