Zhuangzi, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The dream is simple enough to tell and impossible to settle. One night I, Chuang Tzŭ, dreamt I was a butterfly — fluttering hither and thither, following my fancies, conscious only of being a butterfly, unconscious of any individuality as a man.1 Then I awoke and there I lay, myself again. And the question that has stayed with me ever since: was I then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly dreaming I am a man?2
The question is not a riddle with a hidden answer. It is a demonstration. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a barrier — and yet I crossed it twice, once in each direction, and neither crossing felt like a crossing.3 If I cannot tell which side of the barrier I am currently on, then the barrier itself — the one we use to organize everything, self and other, waking and dream, real and not-real — is not as solid as we supposed.
This is the same movement as the penumbra asking the shadow why it is so unstable, why it sits and then rises, moves and then rests. The shadow replies that it depends on something which causes it to do as it does, and that something depends in turn on something else — like a snake's scales or a cicada's wings, which do not move of their own accord.4
Neither the shadow nor the penumbra is the origin; neither is finally itself. The butterfly dream presses the same point from the inside: the one who dreams is not the stable ground from which the dream departs. The dreamer is as much a phenomenon as the dream. What follows is not that nothing is real. It is that no single perspective — not waking, not sleeping, not man, not butterfly — can claim the privileged position from which all others are judged.
The contraries exist; they simply should not be set against each other as if one were the measure of the other.5 Rest in the Infinite, where the transition itself — what Giles rendered as Metempsychosis, the passage between forms — is the only thing we can be certain of.
I, Chuang Tzŭ, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man.Chuang Tzu
Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.Chuang Tzu
Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. The transition is called Metempsychosis.Chuang Tzu
I depend upon something which causes me to do as I do; and that something depends in turn upon something else which causes it to do as it does. My dependence is like that of a snake's scales or of a cicada's wings.Chuang Tzu
Contraries cannot but exist, but they should exist independently of each other without antagonism.Chuang Tzu