Summary:
The interpretation of dreams has always been an important feature of Chinese culture, both learned and popular. This article aims to analyse how Jesuit missionaries in China approached this issue. In theory, missionaries from the Society of Jesus had their own oneirology, inherited from Aristotle, and some of them, such as Francesco Sambiasi and Giulio Aleni, wrote on the matter. However, Jesuit records show that this subject was far from unanimously treated within the Society. Jesuit archives in the Biblioteca da Ajuda (Lisbon) contain several accounts of dreams of Chinese converts, as well as some comments from missionaries on the subject.
This article also contains a case-study of dream accounts and visions of a Chinese convert whose biography was written by Jacques Motel SJ (1616–92).
Summary also in Portuguese.

Local access dig.pdf. [Ribeiro-Dreams.pdf]

Global entanglements of a man who never traveled : a seventeenth-century Chinese Christian and his conflicted worlds / Dominic Sachsenmaier.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: situating Zhu Zongyuan -- A local life and its global contexts -- A globalizing organization and Chinese Christian life -- A teaching shaped by constraints -- Of foreign learnings and Confucian ways -- European origins on trial -- Epilogue: the global standing of a man who never traveled.

Born into a low-level literati family in the port city of Ningbo, the seventeenth-century Chinese Christian convert Zhu Zongyuan likely never left his home province. Yet Zhu nonetheless led a remarkably globally connected life. His relations with the outside world, ranging from scholarly activities to involvement with globalizing Catholicism, put him in contact with a complex and contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces. In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled, Dominic Sachsenmaier explores the mid-seventeenth-century world and the worldwide flows of ideas through the lens of Zhu's life, combining the local, regional, and global. Taking particular aspects of Zhu's multiple belongings as a starting point, Sachsenmaier analyzes the contexts that framed his worlds as he balanced a local life and his border-crossing faith. At the local level, the book pays attention to the intellectual, political, and social environments of late Ming and early Qing society, including Confucian learning and the Manchu conquest, questioning the role of ethnic and religious identities. At the global level, it considers how individuals like Zhu were situated within the history of organizations and power structures such as the Catholic Church and early modern empires amid larger transformations and encounters. A strikingly original work, this book is a major contribution to East Asian, transnational, and global history, with important implications for historical approaches and methodologies.

Local access dig.pdf. [Sachsenmaier-Global entanglements.pdf]
Also accessible online at JSTOR via Gleeson Library.