We saw the movie, "Inception," last night (reviews here and here).  It was fun.  An exploration of the dynamics of dreaming and the boundary between dreams and reality.  Visually stunning but not all that challenging philosophically (or should I say ontologically).  They do a fairly good job, to my mind, in maintaining the distinction between dream and reality – even if there is a tease at the end to suggest something more unstable.  And in that way, while it presses beyond Zhuangzi's simple opposition of one dream and reality, by pressing into dreams within dreams, it is ultimately not quite as radical as Zhuangzi.

The most famous Zhuangzi dream image is, of course, the butterfly:

Long ago, a Certain Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly – a butterfly fluttering here and there on a whim, happy and carefree, knowing nothing of Chuang Tzu.  The all of a sudden he woke to find that he was, beyond all doubt, Chuang Tzu.  Who knows if it was Chuang Tzu dreaming a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming Chuang Tzu?  Chuang Tzu and butterfly: clearly there's a difference.  This is called the transformation of things. (34-35)

As I have argued elsewhere, this could be taken as a radical rejection of the possibility of distinguishing between reality and dreams (should we call them "non-reality"?), but I think it is better to see it as simply a device for raising doubts about attaching too much certainty to any particular account of reality.  But even in that, Zhuangzi is more challenging than "Inception."  Save for one character, who loses the ability to make the distinction between reality and dream, and who then goes crazy (I think we can say that…), the movie fairly clearly maintains a clear line between the two.  At the end (no spoilers…) we can see clearly what reality is.

There is another Zhuangzi dream passage that I like more than the (in)famous butterfly:

You might dream that you're drinking fine wine, then the next morning you're weeping and sobbing.  You might dream that you're weeping and sobbing, then the next morning  you're out on a rollicking hunt.  In the midst of a dream, we might even interpret the dream.  After we're awake, we know it was a dream – but only after a great awakening can we understand that all of this a a great dream.  Meanwhile, fools everywhere think we're wide awake.  They steal around as if they understood things, calling this a king and that a cowherd.  It's incredible!

Confucius is a dream, and you are a dream.  And when I say you're both dreams, I too am a dream.  People might call such talk a sad and cryptic ruse.  But ten thousand generations from now, we'll meet a great sage who understands these things.  And when that happens, it will seem like tomorrow. (32-33)

The line – "In the midst of the dream, we might even interpret the dream." – is what "Inception" is all about.  Indeed, it is this idea on steroids.  But I don't think the movie goes quite as far as Zhuangzi is going here, to raise questions about our ability to really understand what is around us.  For him, we are caught in dreams because we do not allow  ourselves to open up to Way, to drop our humanly created concerns and apprehend all that is around us.  Only when we awaken to Way will we finally emerge from our dream state.

Our daily perceptions of reality depend upon humanly created frameworks of knowledge that are, for Zhuangzi, rather like our dreams.  And it is only when we give up those frameworks, walk away from "knowledge," that we will really awake….   That's more than what "Inception" is asking of us…