First, as a reminder I want to remind you that dreams speak in images, metaphors; they do not speak in the language of the rational mind. In a dream we need to read everything in the symbolic dimension.
Heiner Fruehauf, Ph.D., one of our prominent scholars and sinologists, in his teaching often describes Chinese medicine as an ancient “symbol science”. This symbolic dimension of Chinese medicine can reveal itself surprisingly in the dreams of our patients.
The patient who had this dream had recent undergone a cone procedure to remove abnormal cells detected in a pelvic exam. She was healing very slowly from the procedure. This procedure is usually done on women much younger than the patient. She worried about her slow healing time, that perhaps the procedure did not remove all of the problem cells.
In the dream BD is walking home and being followed by a man. She goes into her apartment building and gets into the elevator without him following her there, but when she gets off on the third floor she sees him there, and he pushes his way into her apartment. She yells at him to leave.
The dream then switches to a first floor apartment in the same building. Now the man has multiplied almost as if cloned. The whole apartment is crammed full of similar men. She again yells forcefully for the men to leave and calls 911. The police arrive, and she wakes up before she can learn if the police managed to remove all the men.
Then BD falls back to sleep and a date—October 6— is given to her in a dream. This date has no known significance to her waking life.
My thought on this dream is as follows: The initial assault occurs on the third floor. I take this as the upper jiao. In fact this patient has suffered a great many severe emotional traumas and betrayals in her life, both as a child and adult. This can be seen as damage to the PC, located in the upper jiao. The dream action then moves to the lower jiao—the first floor. This is the pelvic area where her current medical problems are located. We see BD’s fears represented in the unknowingness as to whether the police succeeded in getting the intruders all out.
BD calls 911. She is signaling where help can come from. From 9 to 11 is SP time in our Chinese clock. In fact BD always has an obvious yellowish cast to her skin. She also has a strange relationship with food, professing a wish to live without needing to eat, i.e., food brings her little joy or pleasure.
If we are thinking of what SP points to treat, the answer is given in October 6. This is 10/6 and in fact SP 10 and 6 are commonly used points on the SP channel. In fact I did needle these points on her, and the transformation was remarkable. This is a patient I had treated many times previous to this dream. I was familiar with how she expressed herself after a treatment. In this particular case, when I used the dream images to inform what I did, she was a transformed person, almost unrecognizable.
The dream shows us that the pelvic area problem actually started with an offense to the upper jiao, i.e., this is where the man first invaded. I suggested to BD that she go to a therapist to explore working on these childhood and adult traumas. Clearly they were still causing problems in her life. And we are told in the images that the nature of the invasion is yang; all the invaders are male. Here I read that primarily as aggressive due to the behavior of these dream men.
There is much more to this dream of course, but here I tried to ease out some of the basics to illustrate how Chinese medicine might appear in a dream. I have in fact worked many three-story building dreams over the years, and the three jiao idea is almost always helpful in understanding what is really going on.