This paper explores the relationship between cultural myths and clinical experience. The author makes use of individual case material to exemplify the way that culture informs the development of primary and secondary processing as it is elaborated in dream work, and thus in the space of the psychoanalytic session. Looking at the case of a man whose history is nested in both Eastern and Western culture serves to illuminate not only the individual dilemma, but also the transformative and obfuscating functions of the unconscious processes themselves.