TL;DR: Giai mong truyen is a story type that narrates a dream and then interprets it, common in Vietnamese folk and medieval literature. Yet Phan Ke Binh in Viet Nam phong tuc (1915) held that dreams are merely a convergence of thoughts within the mind and need not come true. Reading giai mong truyen today should therefore treat it as material on mentality and culture, not as a table for looking up fate.
What is giai mong truyen?
Giai mong truyen is a story type whose plot revolves around a dream and the interpretation of that dream, or in which the dream itself is a forecast recounted as an event. In Vietnamese folk and medieval literature this is a familiar motif: a character dreams, meets deities or the deceased, receives guidance or a symbolic image, then wakes and acts accordingly. The later outcome is usually told as evidence that the dream came true.
Two distinct layers need separating. The first is the real-life practice of cầu mộng (prayer for a dream) and dream interpretation, recorded in texts. The second is giai mong truyen as a literary genre, in which the dream is an artistic device opening another layer of meaning in the story. The two layers often interweave, and that interweaving makes this topic belong both to folk belief and to literary study.
Phan Ke Binh in Viet Nam phong tuc (1915) confirmed that the cầu mộng practice really existed: when people needed deities to advise them, they would fast, bathe clean, bring incense and offerings to a temple, then sleep there; whatever they dreamed they used to judge fortune or misfortune, and students before exams were the most frequent practitioners[1]. This is a contemporary record of custom, not a scientific treatise, but its documentary value is high because the author observed it directly.
How did people in the past think dreams operated?
In the common folk understanding, dreams are a channel of contact between the living and the invisible world. Deities, spirits and ancestors could borrow a dream to foretell good or bad events. This is why the cầu mộng practice at temples existed: people actively created conditions to receive a dream, rather than only waiting for one to come naturally.
The second mechanism is the dream as a reflection of the inner self. This point deserves attention, because Phan Ke Binh himself, after listing a series of interpretations, held that dreams are merely a convergence of thoughts within the mind and need not come true[1]. He also noted that a skilled interpreter does not stick to one method, but varies by person, by dream, by moment, interpreting differently each time[1]. So even in this early twentieth-century text two attitudes coexist: one is belief in omens, the other the recorder's own scepticism.
The third mechanism, belonging to the interpretive scope of esoteric schools, treats the dream as a sign of fortune. Some Tử Vi books describe the star Thiên Riêu as symbolising dreams while also linking it to the ability to foresee events, that is, to see beforehand what will happen. This is the understanding of one specific divination system, not a scientific conclusion about dreams, and should be read as such.
Dream categories and interpretation in old books
Viet Nam phong tuc reproduces a dream interpretation table grouped by category, and this table is good material for seeing how people in the past classified dreams[1]. The book groups by the subject of the dream: astronomical dreams, geographical dreams, ghost and deity dreams, human dreams, miscellaneous dreams. Each group has its own omens, and an omen may be good or bad depending on the detail.
| Dream group | Example recorded in the book | Omen |
|---|---|---|
| Astronomical | Sun shining into the house | Promotion in office |
| Astronomical | Red clouds | Auspicious |
| Astronomical | Black clouds | Inauspicious |
| Geographical | Earthquake | Related to officials |
| Geographical | Carrying stones into the house | Sign of wealth and honour |
| Ghost and deity | Deities coming to the house | Blessing and fortune |
| Ghost and deity | Being beaten by ghosts or deities | Misfortune |
| Human | Husband and wife quarrelling | Indicates illness |
| Human | Seeing one's child die | Becoming rich |
| Miscellaneous | Seeing flowing fire | Becoming rich |
| Miscellaneous | Grass growing on the roof | Misfortune |
What stands out is that the table's logic is not consistent with ordinary good-bad criteria. Seeing one's child die means becoming rich, a quarrelling couple indicates illness. This is the familiar inverted reasoning of folk belief: what looks inauspicious in a dream may announce good fortune in life, and vice versa. Precisely because there is no fixed rule did Phan Ke Binh stress that one must go by person, by dream, by moment[1].
Why can the dream interpretation table not be used as a fixed reference?
Because the source itself states clearly that it is not fixed. A reference table is only valid when the same input always yields the same output. Here the very recorder of the custom asserts that interpretation must change by person, by dream, by moment[1]. In other words, flexibility is not a flaw of the method but its principle. This makes mechanical lookup of dream interpretations alien to the very tradition it invokes.
How are dreams understood in Vietnamese literature?
In literature, a dream is usually not merely a detail to provoke curiosity but a narrative device with a function. It lets the author bring into the story content that would be hard to put directly into a character's mouth: prophecy, moral judgement, foretelling of fate. The dream is also a place to connect the story with the other world without breaking the realism of the main narrative.
Tran Van Thinh (2018), studying Southern folk culture through Son Nam's short stories, argued that literature is an important source for researching folk culture in context, because literature can contain many folk cultural elements, most of them performance events, and because the writer is seen as a kind of subject who preserves, transmits and actualises folk culture[2]. Applying this view, giai mong truyen is not only a tale about omens but also a place preserving how people actually performed rituals, prayed and reasoned.
Dinh Hong Hai (2014) offered another reading direction when analysing the dream phenomenon in Vietnamese culture through Carl G. Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. In that study, Jung treats the Phu Dong dream as a collective unconscious phenomenon. This is a deliberate scholarly interpretation, using a psychological theoretical framework to read cultural material, not an assertion that dreams have prophetic power.
These two reading directions do not conflict: one stresses the text's function of preserving culture, the other stresses the shared unconscious layer that dream images touch. Both avoid the question of whether dreams come true and shift to the question of what dreams do in the community's spiritual life.
Should one believe in omens in dreams?
No scientific basis exists in the sources here for asserting that dreams foretell the future. What the sources show is that people in the past believed so, and that this belief had clear social functions. Belief in dream omens helped people prepare mentally for events, find a framework to understand surprises, and in the case of the cầu mộng practice before exams, it was also a psychological reassurance ritual before an important examination[1].
The recorder's own caveat should be read as methodological guidance: a dream is merely a convergence of thoughts within the mind and need not come true[1]. This is not a denial of culture but a reminder that recording a custom and believing in its efficacy are two different things.
Why read giai mong truyen today?
Read it to understand what people in the past thought about the relation between dreams and life, to see how literature uses dreams as a storytelling device, and to recognise that even within the tradition there was a sceptical voice. For folk culture researchers, giai mong truyen is material on performance and on the language of belief. For general readers, it is an interesting slice of Vietnamese mentality, not a handbook for looking up fate.
Some hexagrams in Khong Minh Than Toan use dream imagery to speak of unfinished matters, for instance a commentary on a hexagram with a verse saying red leaves fade, night wind scatters them away, and a beautiful dream at noon is cut off midway, concluding that the sought plan is hard to achieve[3]. This is a use of the dream as metaphor for fortune, belonging to the understanding of a divination system, not a description of a real dream. Readers should separate the literary metaphor from the advice and treat that advice as the book's view, not a conclusion about anyone's future.
Conclusion
Giai mong truyen is a literary motif tied to the real-life practices of cầu mộng and dream interpretation, recorded in custom texts and reused as a narrative device in literature. Understandings of dreams change by era and by teller: at times a channel of omens, at times a reflection of the inner self, at times material for cultural analysis. The memorable common point is that even in the earliest source here, the author himself questioned the belief he was recording.
