Have you ever had a massage, or acupuncture treatment, and gotten the, “Yep, that’s the spot,” feeling when a certain point on your body was pressed? We call those “ah shi” points. “Ah shi” roughly translates as, “Oh, that’s it.” These points tend to feel tender, or sensitive, or simply significant somehow.

In this conversation with Katherine Bell, it occurred to us that the “ah-ha moment” in dreamwork is the same sort of thing. The dreamer just knows: "That’s it." Tender points on the body, which we press on for therapeutic effect, are not unlike tender points in our mental/emotional selves - which dreams can press on quite precisely.

This episode is a recording of my interview on Katherine Bell’s show, The Dream Journal. I joined her on live radio in May of 2020. If you’ve never listened to The Dream Journal, I’m pleased to introduce you to it. Katherine Bell interviews dreamworkers and takes call-ins from live listeners every week. She always begins the show with some reflections on her own personal dreamwork. In our conversation, we dive a little deeper into the dream she shares, looking through the lens of the Five Elements.

You’ll hear Katherine ask me about how I bring dreamwork into my clinical practice. I share that I find dreams helpful in two major ways: deepening the level of the conversation; and helping me and the patient recognize “where the action is.” We also talk about how locations on the body can be specified by a dream, often by an event like a snake bite or an insect sting. Since there are hundreds of acupuncture points on the body, it’s always worth asking what acupuncture points were contacted in a dream - especially if they were “punctured,” maybe by a fang, stinger, or blade.

There's extra fun in this one because we have call-ins from dreamworker Billie Ortiz and a member of The Dreamers’ Den. We talk about “car dreams,” and a dream that includes an unexpectedly welcome message.

Click Play now to listen in. Show notes: thedreamersden.org/17