The Butterfly Dream 蝴蝶梦 Hu Die Meng. Based on a famous story of Zhuangzi who had a dream that he became a butterfly. After he became awake, Zhuangzi wondered if he had become a butterfly, or the butterfly had become human. In the same story, Zhuangzi's wife had died recently, and a friend asked why he did not mourn. To which Zhuangzi replied, "When she died, I was in despair, as any man well might be. But soon, pondering on what had happened, I told myself that in death no strange new fate befalls us. In the beginning, we lack not life only, but form. Not form only, but spirit. We are blended in one great featureless indistinguishable mass. Then a time came when the mass evolved spirit, spirit evolved form, form evolved life. And now life in its turn has evolved death. For not nature only but man's being has its seasons, its sequence of spring and autumn, summer and winter. If someone is tired and has gone to lie down, we do not pursue him with shouting and bawling. She whom I have lost has lain down to sleep for a while in the Great Inner Room. To break in upon her rest with the noise of lamentation would but show that I knew nothing of nature's Sovereign Law. That is why I ceased to mourn." The play imagines Zhuangzi meeting his wife in a dream, and testing her loyalty to him even in the afterlife.