zhuāng​zhōu​mèng​dié

Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly

庄周梦蝶 莊周夢蝶 zhuāng​zhōu​mèng​dié
Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly
The story from the "On the Equality of Things" chapter in the book 庄子 zhuāng​zi of Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly and waking to wonder if he was a man dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of a man; used to describe the difficulty in distinguishing reality from illusion or the fleeting, dreamlike nature of life.

Frequency

Written text
0.037 per million

Sources

Frequency data
BCC Corpus (BLCU)