 Dreams have always been a fascinating part of healing and even healers and physicians throughout history. I mean, even in ancient times you had the Asclepians and these various temples throughout the world where people would go, sometimes imbibing substances or sleeping where there were gases seeping, and pray for actually a healing dream to help them with their chronic illness. I love this idea of praying to the gods or prompting the subconscious whatever word you want to use or whatever your beliefs are. I love this idea of utilizing dreams as one of the useful therapies or one of the useful breadcrumbs for finding healing again. So in this video I thought I would share some very basic low level insights on Chinese medicine and dreaming for health or for illness. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hein, author of the health book Master of the Day and Doctor of Chinese Medicine. Now before we jump into this video, there's two very important links right below. The first is if you'd like to join my weekly video newsletter, there's a free guide, four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. In addition, the second link is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, there's a link right below this video to my clinic, my private practice and how to reach out to me. Now there's definitely a link between dreams and pathology to a certain degree. You know, one of those things that most people report is as they get over that 30, age 30 hump, they notice that they get indigestion more often and they get insomnia more often. Now, one of the interesting correlations is how often indigestion and insomnia are linked. Most people I know over the age of 30 will say if they don't sleep well, you know, one or two times it's because they ate too late or they ate too much. And often people will also say that they get weird dreams when they're indigested. Like if they're getting too much reflux or just their stomach doesn't feel quite right, they'll have light sleep, vivid dreaming or they'll just frequently wake up. I had a weird experience like this earlier in my life. About 10 years ago I was living in China and at that time I was with all these international students where we would study hard and we would party hard. So we would go to our Chinese classes during the day for four or five hours. In the afternoons we would study in some of the cafes and then a few nights a week we would go to the clubs in China. Now I had this experience where any night I went out and had a few drinks with my friends and went to a Chinese club, I would get back really late, really tired and I would always have dreams of tornadoes and jets flying and loud sounds and fires and it was really weird to me because eventually I began to develop this association between having a few drinks, going to a club and bizarre vivid dreaming and I never understood why that was until many years later. But I thought I would jump into some of those associations that some ancient medical techs of ours and some ancient doctors talked about as general loose associations between dreams and specifically pathologies, right? We're not talking about in a Jungian subconscious sense. We're talking about dreams can be indicative of certain pathologies in Chinese medicine, certain organs that are affected with pathologies. So let's talk about this link between dreams and certain organ pathologies. You know in Chinese medicine we have a couple different theories of organs and how they relate to emotions and seasons and pathologies but one of the most interesting things is how these pathological emotions relate to actual dreams themselves. So I had a very vivid experience of this. I was 21 and I was traveling with the Tuareg so if you know the Berber some of the last remaining nomads, real nomads in the world. I was in southern Algeria on the border of Niger and I was doing a vision quest and part of my vision quest was that these Tuareg nomads left me alone for five days on a sand dune in a little cave with no food for five days. So I was fasting and meditating and praying and when you're having eaten in five days I'll tell you the number of dreams I had about food. One night I had 12 dreams about food and thought I was going to become the next Martha Stewart. I was dreaming about the most obscure, bizarre dishes, trips I had to other far off lands and the most incredible tasty dishes I had. I mean I've never experienced anything like that. And so it's clear even on a basic physiological level if you're starving you will probably dream about food right? It's like if you have a stomach ache or if you have a toothache sometimes that carries it into your dream. Let's talk about what specifically that could be in terms of these organs. You know again they're not one-to-one I personally would never use these alone for diagnosis but they're just an interesting facet of Chinese medicine. So when the disease or illness is in the kidney sometimes people have dreams of drowning or being in water or feeling panicked. When the disease is related to the liver sometimes people have dreams of anger or aggression or they feel like you can't move almost like if you're restrained or held down. If dreams are related to the spleen this can be dreams of food which is what I talked about or even swamps or marshes. So the pathological factor associated with the spleen is dampness. So bloating and things like that and flamminess etc. Now regarding the heart the dreams can be a fire or catastrophe or apocalyptic like scenarios. When it comes to dreams related to the lung dreams of flying or soldiers or odd metal objects are things that were reported in these ancient texts. So some of these are more obvious than others you know like with the heart. In Chinese medicine a lot of psycho-emotional or sleep disorders are associated at least in some part with the heart. Some people completely associate them with the heart and so it's obvious that if there is a catastrophe or the world's ending the heart being the emperor of the emotions it's obvious that even if something is just imploding in your life that it could be related to the heart at least temporarily. So again these are related to Chinese medicine's approach of always looking at what are the relationships between things. Never what is just this one thing you know just because your toe hurts you're probably not going to have some dream about some weird unrelated thing but the point is that we look for the patterns because then anything can be anything if you're not looking for a pattern but when you look for a pattern you can see how things are often related and not that they are just these random disparate things but that there actually is a link and when you try to understand that link you can help you understand the root cause of what's going on. Alright guys that is all I have for today again two links right below this video for my free weekly video newsletter on Chinese medicine and if you want to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine both those links are below for my private practice and before you go I have two other related videos for you here.