Dreaming in Chinese medicine and beyond: butterflies and bears, astral travel, and group chats with the ancestors
This month's episode is a welcome chance to explore one of my personal favorite topics of inquiry: dreaming. It is inspired not just by my love for napping under my gnarled maple tree or watching butterflies transform, but because we have noticed a lot of interest and questions in our community. So we try our best to introduce our listeners to the many and varied perspectives on dreaming that are found in Chinese traditional culture. Here are just a few angles that we play with in this conversation:
- Guided by Zhuangzi's famous butterfly dream, we look at dreaming and waking as potent metaphors for the limited human ability to perceive the true nature of reality, or the cosmic Dao, amid the ceaseless transformations in the perceptual realm.
- Going way back to the ancient Shang dynasty, we explore dreaming as a portal through which we can access special knowledge for purposes like divination; receive supernatural gifts like rituals, medicinal knowledge and substances, and sacred texts; and connect with entities that we are unable to communicate with in our waking life, from ancestors to astral deities to talking trees.
- We celebrate dreaming as a space for joyous liberation from the waking realm of ordinary human constraints.
- We briefly touch on the potential use of dreams for medical diagnosis, as expressed in the medical literature. Here we emphasize the dominant perception of dreams as pathological manifestations of excess Qi that is disturbing the healthy equilibrium needed for calm, restful sleep.
- We touch on Tibetan dream yoga and the human ability to intentionally cultivate the ability for lucid dreaming and to communicate in a sort of "group chat" with other participants in one's dreamscape, whether dead or alive.
- In the context of traditional self-cultivation practices, dreaming offers the practitioner a liminal space beyond conscious control, with potentially both positive and negative effects.
- Lastly, dreaming can be a cause of pollution and then require ritual purification or even drastic exorcisms if the dreamer becomes possessed and the entity refuses to leave.
We conclude our conversation by exploring the place of dreaming in the modern clinic, both in terms of the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of dreaming and in terms of its limits due to cultural differences and the unchangeable fact that at the end of the day, dreaming has always been and will always be a private experience ... unless you join the psychic grannies' group chat, that is!
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