Bob Quinn is a full-time Assistant Professor in the School of Classical Chinese Medicine at NUNM in Portland, OR. He has been in practice for 20 years and has a number of areas of interest. In this podcast his fascination with the role of dreamwork in clinical practice is explored. The Nei Jing supports this use of dream images in our diagnostic assessments of our patients (see Ling Shu, chapter 43).
Bob studied with Jeffrey Taylor from 1993 until his recent passing. Jeremy was acknowledged as a leading international figure in driving the strong interest in recent years in delving into dreams in the non-professional community—Jeremy himself was trained as a Unitarian Universalist minister, not as a therapist. What Bob has done in his work is take Jeremy’s style of dreamwork—he called it Projective Dreamwork—and use it as his way of working with patient dream images.
In this way we can expand beyond the paucity of images listed in the Nei Jing. It is one of Bob’s passions to reintroduce this neglected part of our medicine back into common practice. The insights that dreams hold into the deeper layers of our patients are hard to find in other approaches, and this is perhaps why all systems of traditional medicine have valued dreams so highly.