We know that the language and perspective of Chinese and east Asian medicine gives us a whole different glimpse into physiology, health, illness and healing. And if you’ve learned a foreign tongue, then you’ve had experience how language shapes thought, perspective and possibility. 

The systems or currents of medicine we practice, that too gives a framework, a perspective, that helps us to orient and make sense of a patient’s experience and then how we might be able to help them.

For many cultures, dreams are a powerful kind of sensing that speak with a language of their own and can carry important information from our subconscious up into that sliver of awareness that we usually give credit to for running the show. But dreams have their own way of holding and conveying information, and our rational mind is not particularly well suited to that particular non-verbal language. So how do we learn to tune our ears and sensing to the fluidic symbolic language of dreams?

It is doable and there are some surprising possibilities that arise with the right kind of inquiry. Listen in as we sit down for a discussion on dreaming and East Asian medicine. 

Head on over to the show notes page for more information about this episode and for links to the resources discussed in the interview. 

The medicine of east Asia is based on a science that does not hold itself

separate from the phenomenon that it seeks to understand our medicine

did not grow out of Petri dish experimentation, or double-blind studies.

It arose from observing.

And our part in it east Asian medicine evolves not from the examination

of dead structures, but rather from living systems with their complex

mutually entangled interactions.

Welcome to chia logical.

I'm Michael max, the host of this podcast that goes in depth on

issues, pertinent to practitioners and students of east Asian medicine.

Dialogue and discussion have always been elemental to Chinese

and other east Asian medicines.

Listening to these conversations with experienced practitioners that go deep

into how this ancient medicine is alive and unfolding in the modern clinic.

Hey friends.

Welcome back to qiological.

If you're new here, I hope you find this topic today on dreams to be interesting.

And hopefully, hopefully in our clinical work too, we know that the

language and perspective of Chinese and east Asian medicine, it gives

us a whole different glimpse into physiology, health, illness, and healing.

And if you've learned a foreign.

Then you've had experience with how language shapes, thought perspective

impossibility, the systems or occurrence of medicine that we practice that to

gives us a framework or is they'd say in Chinese, a gee I'll do a perspective

that helps us to orient and make sense of a patient's experience.

And then more importantly, how we might be able to have.

For many cultures, dreams are a powerful way of sensing that speak

with a language of their own.

It can carry important information from our subconscious up into that

sliver of consciousness that we usually give credit to for running this.

But dreams have their own way of holding and conveying information.

And our rational mind is not particularly well suited to that kind of language.

So how do we learn to tune our ears and sensing to the fluidic

symbolic language at term?

It is doable and there are some surprising possibilities that can

arise with the right kind of inquiry.

I'm delighted to have this opportunity to sit down today

with Bob Quinn for a discussion on dreaming in east Asian medicine by.

Welcome to qiological rather, Michael, thank you for having me.

There's something about knowing someone across the distance of decades, you

know, even if we're not always in touch, you know, it's like stepping

stones from a one moment in our experience to another, I met you at the

Nigel Dawes seminar, which would have been 11 years ago here in Portland.

That's right.

It wasn't.

That was the first seminar I hosted.

Well, and you've done quite a few since.

Yes, I did that one on my own.

Then I set up a company.

We had our 10 year anniversary in February.

Congratulations.

Thinking of our topic dreams today, we hosted three Chinese medicine.

Dreamworks seminars are very successful, so it's been a great way for me to

learn and pull the community together.

Well, that's our subject today is dreams.

I'd love to know how you got started with this dream work.

What called you?

It started in a very personal way.

In 1993, I was still teaching high school and Eugene, Oregon, and it was very clear.

I was entering the troubled waters of divorce.

And someone invited me into a amends dream group was actually a coworker.

And her, her husband ran the dream group, two of the men in

the group, and it was small there.

I think there are only six, seven of us had studied in their master's

programs with Jeremy Taylor.

At holy names, college and the greater bay area.

Uh, I hadn't heard of Jeremy.

I hadn't really been aware of this whole movement of a dream work.

Of course I was aware of Freud and young, you know, roughly.

And that started the whole process of me starting to unravel the layers.

And there are many of them layers of meaning in dreams.

I started my Chinese medicine study in 95, been practicing since 98.

So this is my 20th year in practice.

It wasn't until much later on really just seven, eight years ago.

The.

I'm embarrassed to admit, I didn't know how much was

written about dreams and aging.

And I know there's a little bit and uh, some other texts I'll tell

the story eventually here in our conversation in a very organic way.

And it just really grabbed me and I just started to run with it and eventually

reconnected with Jeremy Taylor.

So in that initial study, it starting in 93, I met Jeremy.

He came up twice for.

Joseph's day long seminars so that there was some established relationship.

When I reconnected with him, maybe it was eight years ago.

I called him up and said, would you be willing to come up here

and explore this theme of.

Medical meaning and dreams while he was very familiar, Yung wrote about

it and others as well that, uh, health issues come up all the time and drains,

not literally all the time, but often.

And Jeremy for decades was, uh, a volunteer dream worker at an

aids hospice in the bay area.

He was well aware of how often health issues emerge,

symbolically always in the dreams.

And we have to learn how to read that.

So that's how I got into it was just through this personal attempt to

understand what was going on in my life, emotionally going through a divorce,

then over time, it just became a big part of my practice now in Chinese man.

It's amazing how this stuff happens.

I think a lot of us came to Chinese medicine through the

door of our own health issues.

I don't think it's unusual that the questions that we have for ourself

often become sort of a guiding or illuminating path for the way that

we practice medicine in the, and also the kind of medicine that we study.

What aspect of the medicine attracts.

Yeah, well look where I ended up, I ended up at an UNM here in fourth,

then national university of natural medicine in the school of classical

Chinese medicine, which is started by who I think most people will

recognize his name and Heiner is famous.

For many, many things has contributions or are many, but one thing he always

says is Chinese medicine is an ancient.

Symbol science.

And of course his own background and comparative literature and the European

classics equips them better than anyone I've encountered the, to be the one making

this message, I think it's compelling.

And so I ended up in a institution where a reading, what we would

call the nuts and bolts reality.

Everyone thinks of symbolically is well-accepted and the study didn't.

And so it was the perfect place for me to end up to start exploring this dream work.

And Heiner himself is very good at this kind of work.

A few years ago.

In the summer, we had a, a dream group of our own and the department with the

Dean and a pioneer Heiner his wife.

Finder's mother-in-law.

Uh, local astrologer, a cultural anthropologist and another Chinese

scholar with 23 years in China and a PhD in Dallas philosophy.

All these people in one dream group, it was absolutely amazing

and Heiner has real talent for it.

He's very comfortable in the world.

Assembles.

I don't know how else to say.

And it's really helped me.

It's helped me.

It's given me the license to explore this in our clinic.

I'm not sure if at all other schools in the country that this would be welcome.

I just don't know.

I'm really struck by what you just said.

There was a phrase, you said the world of symbols that rings a resonance in.

Because so much of the medicine that we practice, it is a medicine

of symbols in a sense, right?

I mean, if you look at the back of your hand and the way that you can see

the veins, it sort of mirrors what you would see in a leaf, you know, or you

would mirror what you see in streams.

We talk about wind, not just as an external phenomenon,

but internal phenomenon.

I mean, the way that we image the body and the being for that matter.

With the medicine that we practice.

It's, it's a very symbolic line, which as above, so below the hermetic adage,

this does a cosmological science and only at NUNM and the whole country.

I'm pretty confident.

This is true.

You study two entire years of Chinese cosmology.

In fact, one year is required of the students.

We're trying to train the students to think.

Symbolically.

And we acquaint them with the symbols that the Chinese would associate with

spleen would associate with large intestine and so on down the line.

So how do dreams come into all of this?

I mean, I mean, my suspicion is for those that are listening to

our conversation now, since they're doing Chinese medicine, they probably

have an open mind toward dreams.

That might be something they've worked with themselves.

Certainly not something they would dismiss.

But in terms of bringing that into our clinical practice, how would

you start to move down that path it's simpler than you would think?

First of all, let me start with this quote from Jeremy.

Uh, this is not in one of his books, but he said that here in Portland and

one of the three seminars, no system of medicine that excludes dreams

and their significance can make a legitimate claim on being holistic and.

That's quite a statement, but it's, it's almost mathematical

one-third of the time you're asleep.

How can you claim to be wholistic if you're considering the patient only when

the patient is awake and you're believing that what happens when the patient is

asleep is unimportant, uh, insignia.

That's nothing but a bias and a fairly modern one.

There are other cultures, many of them where they hold the

dream material as being sacred really, and very, very senior.

So my doctoral work was on the topic.

Wholeness in traditional east Asian medicine, it took a hundred

pages to come at this question.

What does it mean to be a legitimately holistic medicine and is Chinese

one, the Chinese medicine one.

So that made his work Jeremy's work so significant for me when I really started

bringing it into the Chinese medicine.

To answer your question.

I want to look at a patient dream.

Actually.

Let's look at the very first dream I worked as a Chinese

medicine dream, nothing like a little case study to illuminate.

What we're talking about.

And then I'll tell a, another one after that, but let me first set the stage here.

This is the group acupuncture clinic at the national

university of natural medicine.

Back then it was actually national college of natural medicine and

a lot of students interested in going into public health work.

So we run a, a group shift, so they learn to work relatively quick.

And so in four hours on the shift, we would say 22 patients and things

move at a pretty snappy pace.

There's one young woman was coming and, uh, chief complaint, uh, anxiety, but it's

actually fairly significant in degree that there many days she couldn't go outside.

She came over a period of some months, maybe four or five sporadically

and maybe some small improvement.

She said one day when she came, I'm thinking of joining a, a master's

program in transpersonal psychology.

Uh, inside, I'm thinking, oh boy, you ought to first be able to reliably

go out the front door every day.

And of course we don't say things like that.

No, but all my goodness, it really catches your attention.

Does it?

Yep.

Yep.

So the students and I felt the pulse and a stood our assessments and the students put

the needles in and I was standing there.

And to this day, I don't know how these words came out of my mouth because

I had not been contemplating doing dream work with Chinese medicine.

I had no idea that was really discussed in the niching, but I said to this young

woman, have you had any dreams like.

And she said no.

So I turned to walk away and she said, well, just one image.

Well, Jeremy Taylor has got a fascinating part of, one of his books where he talks

about taking the barest whisper of a fragment of a dream and how a dream group

developed an incredible meaning from it.

And the dreamer radically changed his life because of that one little fragment of it.

And so in this method we ask clarifying questions and I say,

well, what is the fragment?

And she said, a snake on a road.

Keep in mind that I'm in the middle of a room with probably

five, six other patients and things are moving at a fast pace.

I have to move quickly here.

Students need my attention, but you could think if you're listening

to this podcast, what would I add?

Snake on a road?

Well, I don't know.

What can you say about the road?

Well, it's a dirt road.

What about the snake are their colors, yellow and green.

She says without hesitation, are you frightened of the snake?

No.

Are you facing it sort of eyeball to eyeball?

Yeah.

We're looking at each other.

Is it abnormally big now?

It's a normal.

Size snake.

Anything else around?

Is this a road in a city?

No, we're out in the country.

Are there trees?

Yeah.

Are there leaves on the tree?

Yeah.

So these are my clarifying questions and then I've got to decide something

and I quickly go through, I've got a dirt road, I've got yellow and

I've got snake, which is Heiner teaches archetypal animal for spleen.

So three things say earth, and then I've got green.

Uh, for the trees and I've got green and I've got the focus on the eyes.

I've got word and I've got earth.

And then I think, well, do I take a, would point on an earth channel?

Earth point on a wood channel.

In which 1:00 AM I doing union young, then I thought, oh, this is on a road.

So Tai Chong, I think this is going to be liver three, great

thoroughfare thoroughfare as a road.

So I say, I'm going to put one more needle in, I think it has something

to say about your dream and would you pay attention to this point?

And so I just dropped the needle and right as I recall, uh, liver.

And I noticed 15, 20 minutes later, the student intern was taking the needles

out as occupied with another patient.

But I noticed that that young woman wasn't getting up out of

her lounge chair and leaving.

And when I could, I went over because it was clear, she wanted to talk to me.

And I said, I'm curious if.

The needle had anything to say to you and her eyes fairly bugged out of her head.

She said, I became the eyes of the snake.

She was really rocked back on her heels and I was immediately back on my heels.

And all I could say is, wow.

And we couldn't talk about it then.

Cause I got pulled over.

If she came back one more time.

It was really just to say goodbye, but I'm not even clear in my recollection there.

But I started working dreams with every patient who was willing to,

and then just a, a few weeks I had dozens and dozens under my belt

and in a few months, hundreds.

And, uh, I called Jeremy Taylor on the phone.

I said, you might not remember me from Eugene, you know, from Chris's group.

And he said, oh no, no, hire a member.

And I talked about what was going on here.

And he said, sure, he'd love to get.

And that was how the whole thing got started was without one dream

where I felt like a point name was possibly being suggested.

Well, that's happened many times since then, but I wouldn't say that's the

most common, it's actually not the most common way that dreams come, where a

particular point name is, is referenced.

And maybe it's more common than I'm aware of.

And I just don't, I'm not.

No clear enough on all the different point names, but something comes up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's more common is, uh, we'll go back to AI.

Explain that how I found repeated themes.

We had this snake, we had the yellow, we had the earth road.

So this idea of looking for a repeated theme.

That's how I learned my astrology long ago as well.

Don't hang your hat on just one single thing.

If it's going to be important in the dream that's going to, in the chart,

it's going to in the dream as well, it's going to be a repeated theme.

And so that's what I tell people who are interested in doing this work.

And some of our students have graduated and they have been keeping in touch with.

And it's become not only significant for their patients and their own,

uh, family, just to be able to unravel what the dreams are saying.

So anyway, it's had spend marvelously, uh, interesting, and

it's definitely an ongoing project.

And I would say my approach is never going to be as sophisticated as Heiners who,

who, who knows all these Chinese myths and, and they do show up in the dreams

that became perfectly obvious in our summer, uh, dream group that we had there.

That was probably three years ago, maybe four for me, I.

For repeating a five phase references.

It's very common to have a three story buildings and a dream, for instance.

Uh, and so then you've got sun gel that you can look for.

Is there a focus on middle Joe, upper jaw?

So on, I was listening to you unpack this and the way that you inquired into it.

Oh, snake on a road.

And I'm thinking to myself, snake on a run.

All righty.

What do you do with that?

And then it's like, well, what kind of.

And where's the road and, you know, what's around the road and it occurs to me.

We already know how to do this kind of inquiry because when a patient comes in,

they go, uh, you know, I got to stomach.

And we go, oh, is it here?

And we point to our epigastrium or is it here?

And we point toward our belly and they go, oh, it's here.

And they point to their epigastrium and we go, is that more troublesome

for you before you eat or after you?

Right.

I mean, we are really are skilled at taking something that seems

like just a little, nothing, or a throw away and unpacking.

Yeah, that's a good point.

It's really using the same skillset here with the dream.

We're looking to make it visually.

I'm looking to make it visually clear to me so that I can imagine it

as my dream, Jeremy called his work projective dreamwork, uh, because

he said, if I, if Michael tells me a dream, I am going to filter all those

images through my own lived experience.

And reality.

All I offer is going to be projection 100% pure and simple, which is not to say that

it's not going to be spot on and useful.

It might be, it might not be, but we have to recognize that it

will be projection and that we.

I have to watch our language then.

So we say things like, well, Michael, if this were my dream and I do this

all the time with patients, I say in my imagined version of your dream or.

If I dreamed the images you just told me, I would be thinking XYZ.

It might not be the so spot on.

It might be just a projection without any real good basis.

And there's a danger for us in a Chinese medicine, because we've

got our favorite theories and we want to see them everywhere.

And every dream.

That's why I say you have to stay in the images.

Right.

Stay close to the images that were described, and don't use them as

a launching point to get removed 2, 3, 4 steps into your favorite

theory and convince yourself that this dream was about your favorite

theory in Chinese medicine.

Uh, stay in the images, look for repeated themes.

That's the best advice I can give people.

You can get quite far down the road.

Doing just the basics, like say someone is driving south.

Oh, thinking fire element there on highway one.

Oh.

And the war's least scheme one was the heart.

So those two kind of, uh, they're lining up already.

I'm on Pacific coast, highway O T C H pericardium, heart to other, you

know, and, and I'm in a red car.

Right.

And so we look for repeated themes like that.

Like a differential diagnosis.

Yeah, exactly.

And sometimes all the elements are there.

Except one, we have clear references multiple for all of them, except one.

Then I'm interested in the one, not the, for this year.

So you have to think a little bit it's like Sherlock Holmes,

sort of, it sounds like fun.

I mean, again, it doesn't sound foreign to the way that we work.

It's just a matter of redirecting our attention into this other sphere,

using skills that we already have.

Another thing that occurs to me is in doing this and asking these

kinds of questions, it allows the dreamer to take a moment.

And fill it in.

Yeah, that happens.

You're right.

You know, perhaps they didn't have all the detail in the dream and maybe even

the dream may actually have doesn't match the dream that they report.

But when you inquire of them and they're starting to go inside

and they're looking and they're feeling, and they're reconstructing,

they're going to create something.

That's got a certain coherence with what's going on with.

Right.

That's the point that young makes, by the way, it's worth making that here,

that a person can re dream a certain scene and a dream multiple times.

And they, there could be slight differences.

I experienced this in my own dreams, all of that.

And they can even come concurrently two versions of the same

scene with slight variations.

So when you ask them, uh, for details, it's heard of is like a, it all collapses.

The one that they pick out to tell you, it was the one that you should be working

and that they might report two iterations, and then you have to work both.

Well, there's often more information I would suspect, you know, I mean, we

see this in a regular clinical practice sometimes as people just, they begin to

get a better felt sense of their body.

They can report more sensations that they have in their body.

Yeah.

Especially the big dreams, you know, Carl Young talked about, I

can't remember what the number was three or four or five big dreams.

Upon which our life will turn those kinds of really big, big dreams there

worked for years and years and years.

I just recently had an insight to one that I worked with Jeremy, uh,

many times he and I stayed in touch by telephone, uh, almost every month.

W w work, uh, my dreams and one, I worked many, many times and,

uh, innumerable hours on my own.

And I recently got another insight into it.

It's just astonishing.

How many layers of meaning.

I would say that nothing insignificant shows up in a dream, but it all has

significance of one degree or another

I suspect the stuff that shows up is the stuff that might be more easily

digested at that moment in time.

And then as that's incorporated, then deeper material has a way of surfacing.

Yeah, I suspect you're right.

I heard you talk about Heiners sort of fluidity and fluency with a lot

of symbolic language and a lot of the symbolic Chinese stuff, and

then some of the European as well.

And it occurs to me that every one of us has some kind of a symbolic language.

That's ours, right?

It could be the fairytales.

Re-read his kids.

It could be the poetry that we read as adults.

It could be the doctor who series that we watch on Netflix.

I mean, there's all kinds of places where we build our own symbolic library.

And my suspicion is it's probably better to bring our symbolic

library that we're familiar with.

To the encounter rather than try to grab someone else's.

Does that, does that make sense?

Am I on the right tracker?

Yeah, that's also again why Jeremy called his work projective dream

work, but to get to your question, they both show up the grand themes.

Are in embedded in the myth.

They do show up in our dreams, as young would say they were all part

of the collective unconscious, but the personal shows up as well.

And for us as clinicians, that's why we have to be in a dialogue with

our patients about their dreams.

We can't just tell them as the Sage from.

Exactly what the meaning of their dreams would be.

For instance, maybe someone had a, a very terrifying experience

with snakes as a child.

Then the snake dream that I described to you is going to have

a different layer of meaning.

And then for this patient who had had a actually no previous

horrible experience, With snakes.

I have to finish that story.

Actually, after that dream, it was about five months later.

I brought Jeremy the first time and that whole five months, as I said, I

don't know if I saw that patient again.

And if it was, it was just that she came to say goodbye.

And then on the Monday after Jeremy left, I was in.

Uh, part of our campus and I was looking for an office and I didn't

know where it was and someone passed by and I said, do you know where

those such-and-such office is?

And she said, yeah, it's down there in the left.

And then she walked past and I, then I caught her.

I said, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, you used to come to my group shift.

She said, yeah.

Hi, Dr.

Quinn, how are you?

I said, you had that wild dream about the snake.

She said, and you wouldn't believe what.

She said it rocked me so much.

I had to go out and walk about, she said, I just packed everything in my car.

And I took off.

She said I was driving on a dirt road through the Arizona

desert in a giant snake, crossed the road in front of the car.

I was driving very slowly.

She said I parked and I followed it through the desert.

First of all, it just sounded like someone crippled with anxiety.

Following a giant desert, why I've got goosebumps here.

And she said, and I had a cosmic download that I wasn't supposed

to study transpersonal psychology.

I was supposed to study Chinese medicine.

And, uh, she was in that administration building there because she had

already applied and been accepted.

I was unaware of that.

And she had just been there to put it on hold because she had just learned she's.

So that, that's how that story finished as she's still, as of

this date has, has not maybe, maybe she went to a different school.

She has not enrolled in our program.

I think child must be five, six years old now, something like that.

So that's how that story finishes.

And you see, uh, how significant one dream works for five minutes

can be in a person's life.

And that's what really draws me into this because I'm very

interested in the transformative potential of Chinese medicine.

And I don't think it's any accident that this ended up really with its own

chapter and, uh, the Sue and link shoe, you know, it's just, uh, it's all there.

Talk to us a little bit about what you found in the, uh, link

shore about, uh, about dream.

Well, let me give some quotes from link shoe.

When the kidneys are in excess one dreams that the spine is detached

from the body when they are weak.

One dreams of being immersed in.

And it goes through all the Ian Oregon's that way, but also you see, the young

are dealt with as well and going through excess signs and deficiency signs.

And so you end up with 30 or so images.

Well, the first thing, if you go out and try to do dream work with that,

you, you you're immediately confronted with a problem because those images

don't come up that much being immersed in water that comes up all the time.

Dreaming of volcanoes comes up all the time, dreaming of

your spine, being detached from the body I've yet to hear it.

So they don't have enough images.

Well, I asked one of the Chinese faculty at our school.

Do you have any friends in China?

Do this dream work, he said, oh yeah.

They asked their patients about these specific dreams.

Well, that's where I'm saying that being mentored by Heiner has had real

value for me, because even in the, say, like an herbal classic where you

think it's being literal and it's in black and white, if this, this, this

happens, you have to give Lily bulb.

That doesn't mean that to Heiner it means you give Lily bulb or.

Something like Lily bulb.

He's never going to be literal here.

Being literal about the few images that are mentioned is useless.

You can't get anywhere working people's dreams with these few

images and Heiner would say it was never meant to be these few images.

This has meant to give a taste of how the work goes, Oregon by Oregon.

Right?

Being in water and thinking of kidneys, what's the big surprise there.

Things flying in the air and thinking of the metal element.

What's so surprising about that or dreaming of white objects.

What's so surprising about thinking of the lung.

There are dreaming of being in a forest with mushrooms.

What's so surprising about thinking of liver.

It's actually just common sense familiarity with

the five element language.

So that is how we go about this work.

We, we look for common sense references to things we should know quite well

from our Chinese medicine training.

And we're looking for excess sins efficiency aspects of it.

That's what we have from the nature thing.

Yeah.

The way it might work in a dream, you would have to see

sort of, uh, what condition.

To the elements seem to be in, and these dream images you can read from

what's going on and the images is it.

It's saying that the, you know, the liver is perfectly healthy or here's

an example of a dream that came up in one of Jeremy's seminars here.

If someone's slipping, these are the dreamers words on

a dilapidated wooden deck.

Sliding across that.

And then hanging by her fingertips off the edge, went under hers,

arranging chasm, because there's been a torrential downpour.

So dilapidated wooden deck is the liver function healthy.

It can't be right.

It's her, in fact, it's her downfall in the dream.

And in this case, uh, I don't know what was going on with her.

Uh, liver, Oregon, but liver as a vision function in her life, right.

Liver as going to the east where the sun rise.

This needed major reworking in her life.

And after the dream, I don't know if we'll go through the whole dream,

but she totally got that message and dramatically reworked her whole life

and career changed, went into those big training for chigong therapy and on

and on all because she recognized and a recurring nightmare of decades never came.

Wow.

Let's take a few minutes and dig into that a little bit in that dream, you

have the, the raging water, uh, but earlier in the dream per a person

could see, actually that's not the problem, even though water was coming

up in the barnyard in the dream, the dreamer looks out and her horse.

Right.

This is the heart, the archetypal animal for the heart Oregon network

is the horse, her horse, which by the way, is named precious was okay.

So water is not what I, as a practitioner need to worry about for this patient,

even though it's accumulating and it's raging in the chasm below,

the best place to work on for this patient is her downfall, which is the.

There is that choice often in a dream that more than one element will be discussed.

And it's sort of like the dream is a presenting a bowl.

And we've got a lever, you know, a pole or a pipe, and we can place it in a number of

places to try to get this Boulder to move.

And if we really contemplate what's going on in the dream, we can make a reasonable.

Intelligent guests about where we best slays the lever.

Now, in some cases like the dream I told of deliver three, we get wood and earth

in one point, that being very efficient.

Um, and so they're both covered, but that's not always going to be the case.

No.

I'm just thinking about that first dream treatment that you did there.

It, sometimes it seems like the universe just Hans does something really juicy

on the first go round just to make sure that we're paying attention.

It's like, oh, you're paying attention to this.

Okay.

Watch this.

And then you get hooked.

It's like, oh, there might be something here.

And then it gets harder.

Then you got to work.

Yeah.

I'd like to tell a dream where you see the whole treatment over a period of a few

years as told all in one dream you gain.

It's not that long a dream let's have it.

And it's got an herbal component here that I think will be interesting to you.

This was told to me over the phone, I hadn't yet treated this patient.

Although I have, since then, uh, treated, uh, her many times.

She was maybe a year from retirement at the time of this dream.

And she didn't yet have a diagnosis of chronic Lyme that later was established.

She was suicidal at this time.

She doesn't so much pain and unable to sleep at all at night.

And if not for having a son, she would have committed suicide.

She said to me many times, so she's in a wooden boat with her.

On a narrow jungle river.

Uh, the foliage at the Riverside rises steeply and

it's quite tall, almost canyon.

Like she describes it.

She comes around a bend again in this wooden boat with her mother on the right.

She sees a village and puts into shore there at this point in the

dream, the mother figure disappears.

And so the dreamer walks up this small hill into the village.

Uh, which doctor meets her and he looks every bit the role with a bone going

through his nose and, uh, barely dressed.

And there is a hot, she understands it to be his heart right there.

And in it it's filled with Wicker baskets with lids.

She goes in, she reaches into a basket, pulls out a poisonous

snake and bites its head off.

And that's the end of the dream.

Keep in mind, this is someone who at this point has for over 40 years, been

part of animal rescue and the thought of biting the head off an animal like that.

She was horrified by this dream for her, this qualified as.

Again, remembering that she's not at the time of this dream aware that

she has a diagnosis of chronic Lyme.

She later did a genics testing and other things, and I hadn't yet treated her.

This was just in a phone conversation.

She was someone I had known since, uh, 1980.

So the, the image we start with this narrow jungle river and the

foliage going up like a canyon at the side, I thought this is the

very image of a liver construct.

Uh, jungle river, the water is tricky and Chinese medicine because we got

the long as the upper source of water.

It's not tricky.

If it's salt water, then we know it's gotta be the real water element.

So we'll leave that aside for a moment so that starting in a wooden boat and very

green and very narrow and constraint, any idea what her first formula was and

the emotional, the emotional messages.

Yeah, yeah.

With Muhly.

Right.

And she stayed on that.

That's not the typical way that I would teach for doing the goose

syndrome, but this, that formula in one week had her non-suicidal yup.

Unmodified for, she stayed on it for at least two.

Before I got to the whole goose syndrome approach that Heiner teaches,

then it's going chronologically.

Then we come to this village and interesting this idea that

mother disappearing, and also that we have a mother and daughter.

So to me that has given me license to think, which I'm already predisposed

to think as I'm radiant therapist in terms of mother, child relationships.

So I'm thinking if I identify.

The lung then maybe kidney is there or maybe spleen is there.

Right?

I want a mother child relationship then this, uh, which doctor, well, dreams

are full of puns, which doctors, w I T C H, but in her waking life experience,

she's wondering which doctor to go to.

W H I C H.

It happens all the time.

Word plays in puns are in every other dream, sir, a little

mischievous that way, huh?

Yeah.

There's a coyote element to them.

And notice what kind of medicine does the witch doctor practice close to the earth?

He's not even dressed and it's just a native village.

It's all dirt and thatched, huts and close to the earth.

She's not dreaming.

Of a Western medical clinic with white coats and, you know, Chrome tables

that shine and all that sort of stuff.

And then she goes, and she takes a poisonous snake against snake

is the spleen element, potentially the head of a snake as what

she bites off the most young.

Um, most young earth is poisonous if not processed properly.

That's Heiner his whole thinking with this guru syndrome treatment of chronic Lyme

patients is that eventually they've got to get to once you can get them ready for it.

A FUTA formula, whether it's chin young, Don or food.

So Lee, John Guan, or whatever, they're going to get into the food.

So realm at some point, because the GU.

Disease process has hollowed them out.

That's a key phrase that comes up apparently in the Chinese

literature all the time.

And people say that completely unaware of the Chinese literature.

They say, I feel hollowed out.

I don't feel myself.

Right.

And it's chorus, uh, uh, possession syndrome.

And so anyway, you see that and it was actually a year before.

Before she got on to an Aconite formula and now she's on them often

on an often as the need arises.

And this happens with the chronic Lyme patients that the disease processes in

place a long time, that you could end up with some permanent deficits, neurological

deficits, degeneration, and joints.

And so.

And those are what you deal with.

Once the person gets her life back, which she, after about a year and a half

of treatment, she owned three horses, was teaching horse, riding horseback,

riding to disadvantage kids in town.

She was running for spiritual book clubs a week and she still is, by the

way, she's really kind of considered a spiritual teacher in Eugene that.

Was unimaginable to her for some years because of how sick she was.

And the dream says the dream starts with this image of constraint and it goes on

to, we have to get to the poison, right?

The, the head is the most young.

And a snake is the first hexagram, by the way, in the aging, which

is all six lines are young lines.

So you can't get more young than the head of the snake and it's poisonous.

It has to be Aconite has to be.

Wow.

That's so that I think is just such a classic dream.

And that was probably maybe three or four months into

experimenting with this dreamwork.

And that one felt like a total gift.

Yeah.

Well, it sounds like you've had a number of gifts with this.

Oh, hundreds, hundreds.

I, you just, I couldn't, you know, at one point in the early days

of doing this, I was trying to write down all the patient dreams.

Just forget it.

There've been so many hundreds and, you know, I, I keep.

Every week at school, a student will grab me and say, I, I have this dream.

I have to tell you, my whole life is walking around with

other people's dreams in my head.

It's just, it's quite amazing to me how popular this has become at our school.

Well, and it sounds like in doing this work, you're also building your own

symbol library in a very deep way.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's it.

We, the vocabulary of images as being built, this is an interesting one that

is only recently changed and not all the time, but it would be that even

though I had been doing drains since 93, when a patient would say, I have

a dream, I want to tell you my first experience inside myself was pure.

It was like, oh, these people think that I understand something and I panic.

Like I'm not going to come up with anything.

It's going to be a total strikeout when the bases are low loaded and I needed to

deliver a hit, you know, just pure panic.

But I remembered, you know, one of the wars, the people here

in town, really, the senior one

Taught one of our doctoral modules.

And he said, my first 15 years in practice, every day driving

to work, I was terrified.

It helped me to remember that because that's only, just recently shifted

where many times now, when I listened to a dream, I'm not terrified,

which I consider a real milestone.

Uh, it always helps to have experience, you know, the more experience we have.

It just seems to me that when we're sitting with that very pregnant moment of

don't know, we can stay present with it.

And if we stay present with that, not knowing often things will arise, but

you gotta be able to hang with it.

It's like a wild horse.

It's going to try to throw you before you get to ride it.

Can I give you three quotes from Carl Young?

Yeah, man, I love Carl Gustaf.

Yeah.

Jeremy Taylor was a self-described loose young man dreams, dreams are invariably

seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.

So it's from within the person, but it's not from their ego level of being.

Then now their quote, we have forgotten the age old fact that God speaks

chiefly through dreams and visions.

See, I don't discount the possibility.

The reason I asked that first patient, if she had some dreams and I hadn't

been planning to do that, I had no conscious thought about it could

have been angelic intervention.

As far as I'm concerned.

Here's another Carl Young quote until you make the unconscious

conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

So dreams are important.

They're important because, and it's important to tell them to other people.

Young said that he's as uniquely blind to certain things in his dreams as

anyone else would be, even though, Hey, jumped into the whole dream process

more than anyone that I can think of.

So very important, the more we learn about anything, the more we

recognize that there's just not a whole lot that we really know.

Yeah, I love embrace it.

I know you yourself study it.

you know, the Zen idea of don't know mind.

I'm very fond of see dreams are real.

Cohen study in a way that's where James Hellman arrived at the end, right?

He, he was the head of the educational arm of the young Institute in

Zurich for, I think 17 years.

Of course he knew how to unpack a dream, but he was tired of that at the end.

And he just preferred to just let the dream.

Hit you as a Cohen would hit you and not pull it apart piece by piece.

I think there's value in both.

You see the way I unpack that first dream and ended up at liver

three and it had great value.

So there's value in that, but there's also value and especially certain images,

there might be an enigmatic moment in a dream where I can even think of a

dream where a Zen monk is passing me by.

And just the look of his eyes to my eyes and I give a slight bow and he gets a

kind of a funny little smile and there is nothing to unpack for me there, except

to keep that image in a, when I call it up to just sit with the image just as you

would sit with a colon and colon study.

So, you know, you're right.

I, I did spend a little time at UPI and if there's anything.

That those months they're instilled in me or something that I got to touch in on

was this sense that when you don't know.

It doesn't mean the end or stop or give up, but it just means settle down,

get curious, be observant, be aware of what's coming up in myself, witnessed and

see what's happening with the patient.

And sometimes things will come through.

And you were talking about in that first treatment with the liver three,

that the words just kind of came out of your mouth and I have experienced.

Often in clinic, that words will come out of somebody's mouth.

It might be my mouth.

It might be the patient's mouth.

It doesn't matter whose mouth that comes out of.

Sometimes something gets spoken in the entire feeling in the room shifts and

something happens and something's present all of a sudden, there's a vast amount

of information about how to proceed.

Do you have these kinds of things happen?

Yeah, I would say it's in the character of dreams themselves that they will do.

They will make that same kind of shift in the room that you're describing might

just come out of our miles, absent a dream being discussed, but the dreams

have it in their nature that they can make that kind of shift in the quality

of the conversation with the patient.

And what happens with the dreams by the way.

It has to be said here is that when the patients see that from

somewhere inside of themselves, we could call it a deeper level.

An image or a group of images are of the group is emerging with

important health information.

It transforms their consciousness, their whole conversation.

With what we call consensus reality changes.

You can't be in the dream business for, for long before, you know,

the nuts and bolts, reductionistic worldview just crumbles.

It just crumbles you can't hold on to that and do the dream work as it should be.

You become transformed as a person, even working other people's dreams because just

the synchronicities and the inexplicable that show up, it's just too much.

Once you go dream after dream dozen, hundreds, and all of a sudden,

you just aren't living in the same waking life reality that you used to.

And I think that's desirable because I think our consensus

waking life reality is a very pathological edge, should be evident.

What we've done to the, for mother earth, polluted everywhere,

water, air, everywhere.

And this is a product of.

So that dreams can do the same thing you're describing.

It will happen with the dreams.

One final word is when people, when you have a dream and it's overwhelming,

just start looking for a few common.

Themes images that you can relate in some way together.

And then it starts to become manageable.

Yeah.

I had a math test once where I thought I was going to get a zero,

you know, it was upper division math.

I literally thought I was going to get a zero.

Then I thought, well, I can get a 10, I can answer part C of question four.

And then I got a little more and then a little more, I ended up getting a B

minus on the test just by inch by inch, you know, row by row Arlo Guthrie song.

They're going to make this garden grow.

So taking it a bit at a time, find the place where you can get a toehold in

the dream and start working from there.

And things will start to reveal themselves.

Great Bob.

I have so enjoyed this conversation and, uh, it's getting

close to wrapping it up here.

Any resources that you would point people toward if they'd like to.

Dip a little deeper into this.

Well, read the chapters in the nature thing, first of all, and

because we want to do Chinese medicine dream work, we don't want to

pretend to be young and therapists.

That would be very dangerous and read Jeremy Taylor's books.

Just go to his website, Jeremy taylor.com.

The website's being maintained even though he passed away, but he has

great resources on his website.

If you go through old newsletters, he even has one newsletter

on Chinese medicine dream.

So that would be a great place to start.

Another intern thing, a dream teacher would be Robert Moss, M O S S a I

think has worked very interesting, kind of a more shamonic approach there.

And of course we could read you.

Classics another type of classic.

Well, great, Bob, thank you so much.

And I look forward to our next conversation.