Dream of Yellow Millet | Generated by AI
I’ll search for information about 《枕中记》 to give you an accurate introduction.“The World Inside a Pillow” (枕中记) is a famous Tang Dynasty tale written by Shen Jiji (沈既济) around the 8th century. It’s also known as “Record within a Pillow” and is considered an early masterpiece of Tang classical fiction (chuanqi).
The story follows a young scholar named Lu who encounters a Daoist monk named Lü Weng at an inn. Lu complains about his lack of success, and the monk offers him a magical ceramic pillow to sleep on. While resting on it, Lu experiences an entire lifetime in a dream—he marries a beautiful woman from a wealthy family, becomes rich, serves as chancellor to the emperor during wartime, but then faces false accusations of treason and imprisonment. He grows old, writes a memoir reflecting on the vanity of his ambitions, and dies. When he awakens, he finds the monk still sitting beside him, and the innkeeper’s millet is not yet cooked.
The tale embodies Daoist and Buddhist themes about life as an illusion and the futility of striving for worldly success—what seems like a lifetime of achievement passes in mere moments. This story gave rise to the famous Chinese idiom “黄粱一梦” (huáng liáng yī mèng, “a dream of yellow millet”), which refers to the fleeting and illusory nature of worldly glory and ambition.
It’s regarded as one of the defining works of mid-Tang literature and has influenced countless stories about the transience of life in Chinese culture.