Thank you.

Thank you very much, Yolong, for this nice introduction.

This is a bit of a special moment for me as Dr. Zhang just said.

I was a visiting fellow here at the ICAGEF in the years 2009, 2010, at the very beginning of the ICAGEF.

I've given several papers here, but this is only the second time I'm giving a lecture, one of those Tuesday lectures.

So it's particularly rare.

And of course, I do hope that there has been some progress since then, in over 10 years.

Now, the topic I'm going to talk about this evening is related to, first off, an ongoing examination of the transmission,

the composition and the transmission of a written Mantic material, what I'm calling the own hierocritical material.

We'll see in a moment what I mean exactly by that.

And a second interrogation about the status of so-called nightmares, so-called evil dreams or bad dreams in the context of Chinese onyromency,

and even more particularly in the context of its written part.

So what I'm calling onyrocritics.

Let's start with some vocabulary clarifications.

Here, onyromency, that shouldn't be a problem.

This is the divination that takes dreams as its main material.

It's an old tradition, first and foremost, which has partly been recorded and theorized in writing.

That's a Mantic component of what I would call onyrology, which is dream studies or the study of dream, scientific or not, in the most generic sense.

Onyrocritics, on the other hand, that's the composition of dream interpretation texts,

books, texts, which have value as standalone manuals for the interpretation of dreams in a Mantic sense.

So that's a written relation.

I would call it the textual component of onyromency.

And one could also say that it's a full-fledged genre of Chinese Mantic literature.

So here, whenever I talk about onyrocritics, I am talking strictly about written material.

I won't detail this too much, but this comes from a process of reflecting on the term onyrokritikos, onyrokritika in Greek,

which eventually, onyrokritis, the onyrocritic, originally was a person.

This was a dream diviner, but it has come today to mean the book that is meant more or less implicitly to replace the diviner.

So this is the main reason why I settled on this term.

But I do realize, I am conscious that I am perhaps one of the very few to do this so far.

So today's talk will focus on manuscript evidence.

This is what I do.

And when it comes to Chinese onyrokritics, we don't have much choice.

For a very long time, the earliest tangible material we had was what we could call the Tung Huan onyrokritical corpus.

These manuscripts, you see, they are scattered between mainly the National Library in Paris, France, and the British Library in London.

So the Pilgyo collection of Chinese manuscripts and the Stein collection.

Some manuscripts also come from the Institute, the Oriental Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, as you can see from some of the of the shared numbers there.

But today I will focus on the one that is slightly bolder than the others, which is the second.

So let me use for the people who are very kind to attend remotely.

I can't use the laser pointer here, but OK, I can do this.

And you can see that.

Well, that's excellent.

So I will focus on this one. Why?

Well, very simple, because it's the only one which is which has been entirely preserved from beginning to end.

This is the only full text and the earliest so far, full evidence, complete evidence of a dream manual that we have.

All the others are fragments, sometimes very short, sometimes longer.

But this is the only one for which we have the entire text that will become very, very important later.

And so a large part of our of my talk today will focus on this particular manuscript.

I will also refer from time to time to an even earlier piece of evidence, which is the the dream manual fragment on bamboo strips preserved at the Academy, the University,

which was acquired in December 2007.

And first, we don't know precisely where it comes from, but we know for sure that it dates back to to the to the early change.