Lanzhou's dream sequences
Lanzhou doesn't express himself as openly as cean. he's harder to read but i think his dreams and nightmares are important to understanding him. i wanted to go through all of them and try to piece together his state of mind around those dreams
First Dream: Chapter 3
in this dream he's taken back to the day biansha attacked zhongbo. hua pingting and ji gang tells him to look for ji mu, but he cant find him in the heavy snow
lanzhou's dreams/nightmares are all a mix of dream and memory. aside from giving us a glimpse of lanzhou's relationship with his shifu and shiniang, i think this is also informing us of lanzhou's regrets about ji mu's death. he was told to bring him back, but he couldn't do it. ji mu as dying above him but he didn't even realize ot when it was happening (ji mu's blood trickling down to lanzhou but lanzhou not realizing it, “this time he knew what it was”)
by the end of the dream/memory, he's in the chashi sinkhole, and this eventually becomes the recurring focus of his nightmares
this grief is what makes lanzhou try to escape death once again when he realizes someone is trying to kill him in the imperial prison.
ji mu died protecting him, and so he has to live. this grief is also what makes lanzhou defiant towards everyone whos forcing him to confess for shen wei, even tho the easiest thing would be to say “idk anything about shen wei”.
from that murder attempt in the prison, he immediately realized someone was trying to silence him, that there was something fishy about the fall of zhongbo. Ji mu died for someone's schemes, and he couldn't let his death be for nothing. he had to live!!!
Second dream: Chapter 33
he's no longer in the sinkhole this time. he's on the edge, watching ji mu and everyone drown in blood.
“His hands were cold. The blood on them were colder.” this dream conveys his guilt for surviving and imo this also shows us a bit of his self-hatred. i think it's worth noting that this dream happened right after he thought about cean being honest with him, but lanzhou's immediate response was to lie. It could have reminded him of how he's not a good person and how different he is from cean. and this is why he gets that nightmare right after…
in my opinion lanzhou's observation of how different he is from cean is evident in ch 30 where he looks at cean and xiao fangxu through the puddle. unlike him cean can still smile and laugh with no restraints. cean still has that brightness that lanzhou believed he lost. i also think seeing that scene through a reflection in the puddle is a good imagery to convey lanzhou's attempt at “imitating” cean (which he admits in the future). instead of his own reflection, he's looking at cean's
back to the dream, after he wakes up, he immediately leaves and meets with xi hongxuan to basically manipulate xhx into letting him talk to (and kill) ji lei. imo ji lei is a personification of his guilt so killing him AFTER a dream that conveys his guilt could be a way of trying to find some relief from that heavy weight on his shoulders. He then washes his hand desperately to get rid of the stench of blood …..remember in the dream “his hands were cold. the blood on them were colder.” this was now evidence of his guilt that he needs to get rid of. but he cant. the stench of blood lingers on him
Third dream: Chapter 40
This dream is the same as the last one, except now he's exhausted from seeing it over and over every night. in the last dream he tried to move or speak but couldnt, but this time he's just letting it happen. “get it over with.”
his self-hatred couldn't be any clearer here. he doesn't see himself as human anymore.. he's numb with pain. he had already accepted that he only exists because of the world's hatred towards him. He doesn't feel alive…
but then he kissed cean. and please remember ch 234!!! i know this is a huge jump but since he mentioned this exact night in it, i wanted to highlight what lanzhou said about that night! cean had made him feel alive….
Fourth dream: Chapter 142
Huge chapter gap since the last dream, but thats because 1. lanzhou doesn't get nightmares when he sleeps beside cean and 2. because this dream shows us how much he's changed since the last one. From feeling like a dead man walking, to now being afraid of dying
In this dream, much like the first one, he's back in the sinkhole. but this time, the sun is up and stinging his skin. he's human now, he's no longer numb. he's afraid of being smothered in the sinkhole. he's afraid of dying…this dream happened when his hand was injured pretty badly. when he kept getting sick and his injuries were bothering him in his sleep. After he found a reason to live besides hatred, there's now a possibility that his life could be cut short and he'll be helpless in resisting fate again.
i think it's also important that it's cean that wakes him up from his nightmare here. he indeed is “the light that allowed him to escape the darkness of the chashi sinkhole” 😭
Fifth dream: Chapter 169
ok i struggled the most with understanding this dream because it is SO different from the first 4. this dream is about his past before the ji clan took him in. primarily this dream is to provide a glimpse of a time when lanzhou was still living in dunzhou, when shen wei was alive, which is basically used to push us towards considering that past before giving us all the bai cha and shen wei lore.
part of why i struggled with this one is bc i think it conveys something that lanzhou hasn't realized yet: that his denial of any ties with his birth parents, and in turn zhongbo, is his way of coping with the possibility that zhongbo would still not accept him because he carries shen wei's name.
he says that he is his own nightmare to make peace with how he might not be fully accepted because he's a “monster”. he tells himself he is the frigid wind in zhongbo to feel better about still not being able to sever his identity from his past, and being unable to move towards a future where he's rly free to choose his own fate. his dream conveys that denial, but his leap off fuxian peak marks the beginning of his decision to trust that the future will be different. i wrote a kinda short twt thread for this
Sixth dream: Chapter 209
This is the first dream where ji mu isn't in the sinkhole. now it's ji mu leaving him behind in the sinkhole. lanzhou said that he didn't dare reminisce of the good days because it was too painful. he only remembers ji mu as a corpse and as a ghost.
but in this dream, he remembers how ji mu and hua pingting looked when they were alive and it was painful for him….he wanted to forget that because that meant letting go of the guilt he carried for their deaths. He's stuck between moving towards a new future, and feeling like it's a betrayal to leave ji mu and hua pingting alive in the snow.
this dream and the scene immediately after when he wakes up mirrors ch 40. in both chapters, lanzhou dreams of ji mu and wakes up because of cean. they have a similar exchange too
Chapter 40:
Chapter 209:
the difference is that in ch 40, lanzhou sought cean's warmth to forget ji mu. but in 209, he wanted ji mu to come back. and the chapter ends with cean wanting lanzhou to dream of no one but him ….to me this is cean's wish for lanzhou to move forward to a future WITH HIM.
Seventh dream: Chapter 254
in this dream, cean appears for the first time. not only does lanzhou leave ji mu behind, he also is about to leave with cean. this dream to me conveys lanzhou's firm decision to finally move forward, to stop clinging to the ghosts of his nightmares and to finally rely on the people that ground him.
he also has this realization in ch 250 in the middle of battle, which is a response to what he says on top of fuxian peak in 174
lanzhou went from using grief to escape death, to feeling like dead men's bones existing only for hatred, and finally to cherishing life and living for those who were left behind in the snow. lanzhou's dream sequences are snippets of his character journey and they play a huge part in being able to understand lanzhou's mindset throughout that journey