The Dreamer’s Path with the Free and Easy Wanderer (The Hun)
In Chinese, Wu is translated as a number of words. A few relevant to this series include: Five (wǔ), as in five spirits or elements, shaman (wū), and dance (wǔ), which is also symbolic m the context of the five elements/spirits.
In this series, I’ll write about the context of healing through Chinese medicine and what it means to be supporting the continuity of humanity and helping people maintain or return to their sense of being human. That’s quite a feat living in today’s sped up and fragmented world, though I hope to offer inspiration and maybe some clarity when you think about health, healing, medicine, humanity, and what you’re doing here.
Consulting with the Tong Shu (Chinese almanac) tells us that the today brought the season’s shift from spring’s Grain Rains to Summer Begins. As a late farewell and expansion on the clarity to be extracted from the winds of spring, we’ll explore the spiritual and physiological connections between the Liver, dreaming, and the Hun. From the macrocosmic lens, the spring’s Qi nodes are associated with the Wood element, the Liver, and the spirit of the Hun.
As the spring corresponds with the ascension of Yang, the Hun corresponds to the Sun. That is, the Hun is light, pure, ascensional, and yang. When we consider the characters that make up Hun, we find Gui (ghost) and Yun (cloud), Cloud-Soul. In this context, cloud refers to wind which is associated with the wood element and the changes carried by spring. (Bisio, Tom) Think of fresh bamboo shoots sprouting from the soil. Great and rapid changes come through the infancy of humans and spring. The Hun is the aspect of human existence that appears most childlike, spontaneous, playful, inspired, and free.
When undisturbed, the Hun demonstrates our clarity about our life path and purpose. Aside from the Liver, the Hun also resides in the eyes, giving us the gift of vision. When we lie our heads down to rest and go to sleep, it is this vision that the Hun takes with it as it exits the body, rising up, past the Heart/Shen, and through the top of the head.
Your dream world is what allows the Hun to soar and integrate new inspiration each morning as you’re born anew with the rising of the sun. It’s relationship to circulation, space, and the dream body is why it’s called the free and easy wanderer. Visually oriented, the Hun’s presence (and nightly wandering) is key to cultivating a fluid relationship between the dream world and the wake world. This is very significant in the practice of Chinese medicine and cosmology. Cutting one off from the other distorts our perception of reality leading to a laundry list of imbalances and symptoms, including a disconnect from our capacity to interpret symbols. It is through symbols, imagery, sensations, and emotions that the body, and our ancestors, speak to us, so to write dreams (and sleep) off as unimportant and unreal is to be disoriented and out of touch with our full living experience.
To spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping is not a cumulative of wasteful events. It is a practice. We practice to assimilate, grow, aspire, heal, research, remember, resolve, integrate, and to die. We do things in our dreams that we can’t do during waking hours because of limitations. We fly, we travel in time and space in limitless ways, we emote suppressed and amplified feelings, we visit with family and friends we haven’t communicated with (dead or alive), we breathe underwater, we dance in strange places, we float through outer space, and then some.
During the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, Chinese doctors in Persia translated all the texts on dream interpretation from Parsi, from the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist worlds and brought them back to China, and during the Ming dynasty put them into one book. (Liu Ming)
Looking through shamanic practices stemming from these various regions suggests a large amount of agreement from cultures that seem to be quite different today. “Symbolism, as it turns out, is physiological.” (Liu Ming)
“More brain centres light up in response to metaphor than any other form of human communication, thus indicating the formation of new neural pathways arising from and in response to the symbolic.” (Levin and Modell)
It’s not uncommon, however, for people to report that they don’t dream or that they don’t remember their dreams. While this might seem normal by modern standards, it’s diagnostic from a Chinese medicine practice, indicating an imbalance somewhere in the sleep/wake cycle.
Liver Physiology and the Hun
When healthy, the Liver circulates the Qi and blood and offers a stable seat for the Hun to reside in. The inspiration that comes with the presence of having a Hun can be as simple as being inspired to make breakfast each morning, going for a walk in your neighborhood, aspiring to be different than your parents (that you may or may not get along with), or doing a job that you enjoy doing day in and day out— even if it is the exact same thing (and you’ve mastered it long ago).
A person with a healthy Liver is able to get to sleep and wake, just as easily. When the Liver Qi flows well, it allows a person to let go (breathing softens and deepens) and later pulls the Qi back in and down (for movement/circulation) when waking. This is how the Hun maintains its seat in the Liver. When a person goes without sleep for several days, the Hun is inclined to be absent or not in place (in the Liver). In its absence, a person feels disoriented and lacking clarity. If you’ve ever seen a sleep deprived parent put their keys in the fridge or the milk in the cupboard in the morning after many nights of sleeplessness, you’ve witnessed the absence of their Hun!
This is also true in symptoms of jet lag. Falling asleep on a plane and crossing time zones at 700 something miles per hour, for instance, tears the Hun from the body, creating a distance between them and necessitating recalibration and much self-care to drag it back in place. (Liu Ming) Chronic sleep deprivation leading to depression is another example of the Hun being stuck out of the body. Coming and going is what the Hun does, so having good sleep hygiene, rituals, and practices is important to Liver health and stability of mind and emotion. If the Hun is unable to get out, because a person strains themselves to forget or avoid dreams out of fear (from nightmares) or perhaps because they’re unable to sleep enough to dream, the Liver is inclined to get stuck in its own seat leading to Liver Qi stagnation, or in worse cases, Liver Yin deficiency leading to fire, (often manifesting as inappropriate emotional responses, excessive anger, rage, distensión in the ribs/abdomen, headaches, bloodshot and dry eyes, jaw tightness, or lack of emoting). (Liu Ming)
A few Liver self-care tips:
Wake between 5-7 AM every morning when yang/ the sun begin to rise so you can take in more of the yang energy.
Eat a big breakfast (not just caffeine and sugar) in the morning (ideally during the Spleen’s hour from 7-9 AM) to optimize digestion and guide yourself to healthy eating habits that prevent overeating and especially eating too late at night before sleep. Getting over unhelpful adaptations (like eating disorders) happens with the Liver’s help as it cleans up and recalibrates blood chemistry. Considering the Liver/Spleen relationship, sleep is just as nutritive as food.
Going to sleep with too much food in your belly disturbs sleep and creates dampness and food stagnation, weighing down the spleen function when it’s already trying to assimilate nutrients from the rest of the day. This impairs the rest of the four shen (spirits) from doing their functions, including the Liver.
Go to therapy— ideally not just talk therapy. Somatic based therapies are excellent for making lasting needed changes for your emotional well-being. If you’re unable to regulate emotions then become adamant about nutrition!
Avoid alcohol, drugs, and fried foods. This is a major one, especially for alcohol. Alcohol and fried foods burn you up from the inside and dries up the yin. Alcohol is the easiest and most dangerous way to do this and leads to so many injuries of the Liver.
Do five minutes of light exercise in the morning or walk in the evenings before bedtime rituals. Walking backwards is a plus!
When you know you’re dreaming you open yourself to the benefits of having an actual dream practice that was traditionally used not just for healing and diagnostic clues to healing from patterns, but also for divination.
Repeating dreams— for instance—can be signaling how to recover from something. Having a medical condition that isn’t life threatening along with and a repetitive dream can show you how to get out of it (this is loosening your fate/ancestral predisposition) by showing you how to make spirits/organs have comfortable seats so they’re (spirits) not getting pushed out, leading to a healthy life for your allotted years. (Liu Ming)
It’s important to note that divination isn’t about telling the future in this context, though that can also happen. According to the late and great Liu Ming, divination in dreaming means “seeing what’s opening up from moment to moment” (the future is in the present moment). Divination doesn’t come from anxiety. “Divination allows you to have openness. It allows you to see each moment, natural choice... natural movement”. (Liu Ming)
As a practice, the dream path is meant to fully embody our total experience between yin/yang, day/night, heaven/earth, body/breath, sleep/wakefulness. Clarity and inspiration are found in softening the lines and allowing the daytime to cross into dream and vice versa. It’s not a psychoanalytical project where every detail matters and we dig through the subconscious looking for meaningful treasure in oceans of waste. We actually don’t have to try and make it something. We can just let it be what it is. This is the way of the dreamer’s path. (Liu Ming)
Edit: As of January 24, 2022 this entry and following entries that were part of the series called “Wu Woo Wednesday” are being left with the title following the designated category of “WWW” posts. This has been done in response to and out of respect for the word Wu and its meaning as “shaman” in the Chinese language. This post script is here to create accountability rather than to erase a poor choice and to show respect for the culture, people, medicine, and ancestors of East Asia.
References:
Bisio, Tom; Daoist Sleeping Meditation: Chen Tuan’s Sleeping Gong (p. 74-75)
Liu Ming | Sleep, Dream, and the Dao of the Night
DreamBody Webinar presented by Marian Dunlea, M.Sc, IAAP, ICP, SEP| Levin and Modell cited in Wilkinson, 2006 p.10