[4] Academician Bao Shangshu[a] writes an open letter to the palace, in which he decries Zeng's crimes and calls for his removal from office.

[6] Zeng is sentenced to be reborn as a beggar girl who endures a bitter life of hardship, only to be sold off as a concubine to the Gu family.

[9] Starting from the third century, early Chinese writers were already questioning the significance of their existence through creative expression, such as in the fifth-century compilation A New Account of the Tales of the World, where Liu Yiqing writes of "Yang Lin's World inside a Pillow", or Shen Chichi's Tang dynasty chuanqi "Life inside a Pillow", argued to be the most "complete form (of the genre)" prior to Pu's effort.

In Ma's work, Lü Dongbin daydreams for a perceived period of eighteen years but wakes up to discover that in actuality only a few minutes (long enough for a millet to be cooked) have passed.

[13] Originally titled "Xu Huangliang" (续黄粱) and collected in Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai; 1740), the story was one of the first two Liaozhai entries translated by British sinologist Herbert Giles into English (alongside "The Raksha Country and the Sea Market") prior to the publication of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio in 1880.

[10] The original "ethos (of the Yellow Millet Dream)" is not conveyed in Pu's story, however he does refer to it in an appended statement to criticise "the universality of humanity's ruthless and foolish quest for fame and success".

[10] Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang highlight Pu's breaking away from convention, in that "A Sequel to the Yellow Millet Dream" is not a "simple allegory (of life)", comparing it to similar works by preceding writers which they deem as "one-dimensional" with "no intellectual signpost or imagery" and "unsophisticated plots and simple narratives".