Mrs. Lin sat in my office for three months complaining about a tightness in her chest and a mother-in-law who wouldn’t stop buying the wrong kind of tea. She was a civil servant, the kind of person who wears sensible shoes and never misses a filing deadline. It was raining that Tuesday, a miserable gray drizzle that made my joints ache, and I was drinking cold Tieguanyin while she talked. Every session, she’d mention the fire. Master Ming, I’m back in that hallway, and the walls are just melting, she’d say, waving a hand as if to brush away smoke. I told her it was stress. I told her the Fire in her Bazi was being pressured by the Water of her current Luck Pillar and that she just needed to take more baths or move her bed away from the window.
I was wrong.
I was completely, embarrassingly wrong. Three weeks after our last talk, she walked out of the tax office, bought a kiln, and started throwing clay. The fire wasn’t a warning about her health or her husband’s mother; it was her own heart’s Fire—the element of joy and visibility—screaming that it was being suffocated by paper and red tape. A vacation wouldn’t have helped her. She had to burn the old life down to make room for the pots.
Fire is tricky in Chinese metaphysics because it’s the only element that doesn’t exist without a source. You need wood or oil or gas. In the Wu Xing, Fire is the heart. It’s the peak of summer, the heat that makes things grow or turns them to ash. Most people come to me and think a fire dream means their house is going to burn down or they’re going to get fired. That’s too literal. If your Bazi chart is cold and damp, full of Yin Water and Metal, seeing a fire in your sleep is like a gift. It’s your spirit trying to warm itself up. I see it in these young tech workers who come in with their expensive watches and tired eyes. They’re all Fire and no Wood to sustain it. They burn bright for six months and then they come to me wondering why they can’t get out of bed. If you’re already a Bing Fire person—big, bright, loud like the sun—and you’re dreaming of a forest fire, you’re about to hit a wall. You’re exhausted.
My daughter May asked me the other day why her friends keep dreaming about their iPhones exploding or catching fire. I mean, I’m seventy, what do I know about smartphones? I told her maybe it’s a Metal-Fire clash. Phones are Metal—communication, structure, cold. Fire destroys Metal. Or it melts it into something else. Maybe their brains are just too hot from looking at the screens all day. She rolled her eyes and went back to her room. Kids these days don’t want to hear about the Five Elements; they want a pill or a psychic who will tell them they’re going to be famous next week. Anyway, I think I was onto something with the Metal thing. Metal is about boundaries. When the phone burns, maybe the boundary between the world and the self is disappearing. I don’t know. May usually thinks I’m rambling.
Freud. I read him once. He thought everything was about sex. Fire is libido, he said. That’s lazy. It’s the kind of thinking you do when you don’t understand that there are different kinds of heat. In Bazi, we look at Ding Fire and Bing Fire. A Ding Fire is a candle, a lamp, a small flame that needs protection. If you dream of a candle flickering in a dark room, that’s about intimacy, the small, quiet connections that keep us human. It’s about the soul. Bing Fire is the sun. It’s ambition. It’s being seen by everyone. If you’re dreaming of the sun at midnight, that’s a Bing Fire issue. Freud lumps them together into one bucket. You can’t do that. You wouldn’t use a blowtorch to light a cigarette, would you?
There was this man, a tall fellow who worked in shipping. His Bazi was almost entirely Water. Ren Water, Gui Water, just a flood. According to the books, Fire should have been his wealth element, something that brought him balance and prosperity. He dreamt of his childhood home burning every single night for a month. He was terrified. I told him it was good. I told him the fire was balancing his chart, drying out the dampness of his life. I was so sure of myself. I sat there in my silk vest, feeling like a genius. The dreams stopped after he followed my advice to wear more red and sit in the sun, but he didn’t get happier. He became quiet, almost gray. He lost that spark he had when he was scared. I still wonder if I misread the strength of his Water. Maybe he needed the flood. Maybe the fire didn’t balance him; maybe it just made him steam until there was nothing left. I don’t always get it right. The stars are fixed, but people are messy. You can’t just apply a formula and expect a human soul to behave.
People want a dictionary. They want to look up fire and see good luck or danger. Life doesn’t work that way. If everything in your dream was on fire but you weren’t afraid, what does that tell you about what you actually want?
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