On waking up unsure which one
“I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”
The story is usually read as a puzzle about reality. Zhuangzi is less interested in that than in what it does to the man telling it, who has just discovered that his certainty about being himself is a feeling and not a proof.
The passage ends without resolving it, and the lack of resolution is the point. Something can be lived without being settled — which is a smaller and stranger conclusion than the one people usually take from it.