The Bactra Review God's Chinese Son
The dream has a number of features familiar from Eliade's descriptions of
initiatory dreams and visions of shamans, such as the ascent to heaven, the
celestial wife and the replacement of the visionary's viscera with new and
improved organs. Spence doesn't say what Hong's new organs were made of, but I
suspect they were metal. What this signifies, I couldn't begin to say.
For details on the initiatory visions of shamans, see Mircea Eliade,
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask,
NY: Pantheon Books, 1964 (as Le chamanisme et les techniques archaiques
de l'extase, Paris: Payot, 1951).