Transcript - Unlock the Hidden Power of Dreams With Bonnie Buckner, PhD

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Unlock the Hidden Power of Dreams With Bonnie Buckner, PhD

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 525 of Live Happy Now. Many of us talk about following our dreams, but few of us take it as literally as this week’s guest. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week I’m talking with Bonnie Buckner, Founder and CEO of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery, and author of the new book, The Secret Mind: Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform Your Life. Bonnie’s here to explain how our nighttime dreams can help us solve the challenges in our lives, develop our fullest potential, and help us discover our purpose. Let’s have a listen.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:38] PF: Bonnie, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.

[0:00:41] BB: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

[0:00:44] PF: Oh, I’ve been so looking forward to this conversation, because we’re talking about something that all of us do, but most of us don’t really understand, and that is dreaming. I love this book that you’ve written, and I love that your approach uses so much science to back up everything that you’re teaching. I was really curious to learn how you got into this area of study, because it’s a little bit unusual.

[0:01:09] BB: Thank you for asking that question. I got into this not as an area of study, but as a kid. In fact, when I was a young child, I had nightmares all the time, and it was really a lot for me. There was just a moment where I was thinking about, as little kids do, “Oh, what’s the Guinness Book of World Records for never sleeping?” Because I didn’t want to sleep. Then, I just had this flash of, “Oh, wait. This is why I’m here. I’m going to learn how to deal with my nightmares, and I’m going to teach it to other people.” Now, as a kid, I understood that very clearly. Then, as I moved forward in life, what does that actually mean? Then, it became a journey to finding the study part of it and getting into the work of it.

[0:02:02] PF: Was that difficult to find that kind of research? Or was it just, you’re like the bridge that you take all the science of it and you make it so digestible understandable in a way that I really haven’t seen done a lot. Was it difficult to find the research? Or was it already there and just needed to be shared?

[0:02:24] BB: You know what? First, and the most important thing, is I teach a very specific approach to dreaming that is an ancient approach. It’s from the 13th century. I found my teacher through dreams here. I worked very intensely with her, Dr. Catherine Shainberg, for over 10 years studying this work. Then I went to get my PhD in psychology. One of the things that the ancient lineage brings to this is centuries of observation. Centuries of observation from a time when people were way more embodied than we are right now. We think a lot in our head and we have different buckets of facts, but they don’t always get connected. The ancient lineage looked at things in a much more holistic way.

When I went in to do my research, I was not researching dreams per se. I was looking to see what does today’s cognitive and neuroscience have to say about this aspect, or this aspect. Then I started to sew the pieces together. It’s more like a quilt. I’ve pulled multidisciplinary pieces of research and points of view, everything from perceptual geography to cognitive and neuroscience.

[0:03:56] PF: What’s interesting is we all dream, but it’s not something we know a lot about. We read a lot about how important sleep is, like how that is a basic tenet of well-being. We have to have that. Dreams are such an important part of our life. Why don’t we, as a society, learn more about it? Because they impact us. As you said, you grew up with nightmares. I know other people who suffer from nightmares. Why aren’t we investing more time in discovering that component that happens while we sleep?

[0:04:28] BB: I think that there’s a few reasons why. One of them is we live in such a fact-based world these days. There is a truth beyond facts. People get stuck at the fact level. There’s a lot of fear in going beyond to a much more fluid way of looking at things. Because I can’t prove that I have a dream. I was telling you, we were discussing before we started, that I live where I live today, because for over a year, I had dreams that said, “Go to France, go to France, go to France.” I moved from America to France. I took a big leap, a huge jump. I could not have proven beforehand that that was going to be good for me, but for the fact that I now have so many years of living my life as a dreamer. It’s experience, observation fact, not hardcore facts that can be replicated, because it’s my dreaming language. You have your own dreaming language. Does that make sense what I’m saying?

[0:05:42] PF: It does. I wanted to ask about that, because we all dream differently. Do we know why that is?

[0:05:48] BB: Of course. Because everything is subjective. Our entire experience on this planet is a subjective experience, which is why it’s problematic to get mired down in facts. Can I give a story as sort of an example?

[0:06:04] PF: Please do. Yeah. We love stories.

[0:06:07] BB: Great. I love to tell stories because dreams are so fun. I was teaching recently a class called The Bravery of Purpose. There was a moment in the class where a woman began to sob. She said, there’s just no way that we can resolve the problems of the world today. She’s an architect who works with climate solutions. I had her do a little exercise. Now, I talk about imagery exercises, because it’s the same thing as dreaming. It’s tapping into our inner language of experience, which uses images. I had her do a little exercise of imagining she walks into a meadow, she puts her left ear to a tree, and here’s the message of the tree. She begins crying even more. I said, “Well, what is the message?” She said, “It’s bigger than we are.”

Now, that could be taken in different ways. I said, “What is the feeling of that?” She said, “Just the biggest love and possibility imaginable.” Feeling is truth beyond fact. How I feel about something, I would have put my ear to the tree and had a different message. She got that message. Our particularities are completely subjective. The truth of things can be universal.

[0:07:39] PF: That makes so much sense. Why do we dream?

[0:07:43] BB: It just happens. It is one of our most wonderful gifts on this planet, I think, because if you think about it, we’re running around all day thinking and doing a million things in our thinking part of our brain. The executive network functions that are goal-directed, that are solving problems, paying bills, driving, all of these kinds of things. With all these many things, we have feelings about it. Those feelings, I’m using that in a very broad sense, those feelings include what I know about something, how I’ve put all these different experiences together to come up with my inner understanding of something, as well as the new ideas that can come from that.

That uses a different part of our brain. It uses the default network. The default network is highly activated in dreaming, and is the part where we take two plus two and we go somewhere like, 10, or we go somewhere even further than that. It’s how we draw from what we know so far and imagine beyond it. If we don’t have that ability to imagine beyond where we are right now, we would have just stopped and stagnated, I don’t know, several centuries ago, right? Humanity is constantly re-conceiving itself, I believe, through dreaming.

[0:09:15] PF: It’s interesting, because as I listen to you talk, it seems like many of us are missing out on such an incredible potential to improve our lives. We are being given it every night, but we’re completely missing it. I know that you specialize, you teach people how to create a dreaming practice. Can you talk about what that is, what that looks like, and how it can help us?

[0:09:38] BB: Absolutely. I start in The Secret Mind by showing people that everybody dreams every night. It’s just a matter of learning to remember them. There’s very easy little practices, I give them all in the book, of how to develop that practice. It’s as simple as getting a notebook, having the intention to remember it, and writing the date at the top of the first blank page, putting your pen there, and writing it down as soon as you wake up.

Now some people say, I mean, I get so many responses when people come into a session with me, they say, “Oh, I didn’t write anything down, because I didn’t have a dream.” Then I start talking to them, “Well, what did you wake up feeling?” “Oh, I had an image of a tractor in a field.” Well, that’s a dream. “Oh, but it didn’t make any sense to me.” I didn’t say it needed to make sense. Just write it down. It’ll start to make sense the more you develop that language with yourself.

[0:10:38] PF: How can we use that understanding of our dreams and that gift from them to start changing our day-to-day lives?

[0:10:47] BB: There’s a couple of things I talk about in the book. In each chapter, I try to give people very specific things to draw the line between their dreaming experience and their waking experience, because whatever we’re living in the day is what we’re dreaming at night, and whatever we’re dreaming at night we’re living in the day. That includes latent potentials that we’re not exercising, but they’re right there ready for us to exercise.

We have in general, two categories of dreams. There’s unresolved and resolved. Resolved dreams are great dreams where there’s this, “Oh, I had this amazing experience. There was this amazing tree and it was lit in this ethereal way.” That’s a great dream. A lot of our dreams are nightmares, or dreams that are difficult, but also have some good parts to them. Once we start to understand what those actually mean in terms of our waking time, so a nightmare is showing us there’s some emotional entanglement. As soon as I understand that, I now have oriented myself as to where I am in my inner world, which means I have agency to change it.

[0:12:06] PF: As we have those, what we’ll call bizarre dreams, the ones that don’t make any sense, and we write that down, how does that start putting a picture together for us?

[0:12:16] BB: Yeah. The out there is usually the thing we really need to know. I’m going to tell another story. Is that okay?

[0:12:23] PF: Please.

[0:12:26] BB: This woman came up to me in an event and she said, “You’re the woman who works with dreams, right?” I said, “I am. Do you have a dream?” She said, “Yeah. I dreamed that I was standing next to the River Seine in Paris, and I see this horse and carriage coming towards me. Then a red motorboat in the water, zipping away from me. I woke up and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer to do the thing I’ve always wanted to do.” I said, “What was that thing?” She said, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer, or work in the arts in some way.” She said, “That dream was so powerful, I quit my job that very day.” She said, “Within three months, I had a position as a journalist covering the arts. I’ve been doing that ever since.” Now, what about that dream?

[0:13:16] PF: I hope you can put that together.

[0:13:17] BB: Okay, I can.

[0:13:19] PF: Good.

[0:13:19] BB: Because there’s this old lugubrious way of moving that’s coming towards me, outdated. Then there’s this passionate, red, passionate new way of being that’s very fast, that’s moving. Now, in our thinking mind, that executive network, these things don’t make sense. But in our feeling self, that unlocked this inner knowing in her where she knew, I don’t want the feeling every day of a plodding old horse and carriage. I want to be zipping away in a motorboat. That sense of timing, we have to start living today, also play a huge factor. She just woke up and knew now.

There’s a bigger question. If she always wanted to do that, why hadn’t she done it before? You see? She spent her whole life – She said, “I knew I had to do it. I couldn’t wait any longer.” We always want to do something, but don’t allow ourselves to do it, because we get stuck in facts. We say, “Oh, it’s a recession. I can’t change my job right now. Oh, it’s a” – whatever our excuses are.” But the energy and the motorboat shows us that kind of passionate energy, if we really plug into what we know we’re meant to be doing in that moment in time, we will prevail and find a way to do it just as she did.

[0:14:52] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[0:15:02] PF: Now let’s hear more from Bonnie Buckner.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[0:15:05] PF: Is coming to terms with taking action one of the biggest challenges, once they start remembering their dreams? Because you are asking those around you to believe that it’s like, I had this dream and I’m going to do this, or I’ve had this recurring dream, so I’m going to do this, and we know people can be naysayers. How challenging is it for someone to follow, literally follow their dreams?

[0:15:29] BB: I’m not asking people to do anything at all. Every single one of us already has inside of ourselves all the tools we need to solve our own problems. When a person comes to me, I’m just simply showing them, inside you, here’s your lock, here’s your key. Now, you guys do whatever you want to do with that. That’s why the dreams, like the story I just told you of the red motorboat, was such a perfect example of when we plug into what our true inside wants to do, I just have to get out of the way, because they’re going to do it. We know, you can’t unring the bell. “Oh, that’s what I need to be doing.”

Whether it’s, that’s a big example, changing your job. But sometimes it’s just, I’ve been lashing out at everybody in my family. I don’t want to do that anymore. Because we feel it so much more intensely in the dream. We feel the anger more intensely. We feel the fear, so we get a chance to wake up to ourselves when we wake up in the morning and say, “I don’t want to have these feelings anymore. I want to feel something else.”

[0:16:38] PF: What are ways that we can use that then to improve relationships, whether it’s with a significant other, with our children, with people we work with? How can we intentionally take advantage of that time that we’re dreaming and use that?

[0:16:52] BB: One of the most interesting things for me about dreams is the moment a person wakes up, and this is a tip to everybody who’s listening right now, don’t jump out of bed. Don’t grab your phone immediately. That little between-wake-and-sleep space is so highly creative. It is so rich in insights. If you just prolong that period a little bit longer, stay in bed a little longer, there’s going to be thoughts and ruminations that come up. I have people tell me all the time, “You know, I started thinking about this issue that my partner and I’ve had, and is starting to become more clear.”

We have the ability to make our lives better. We run so fast from ourselves that we don’t even stop to see what we can actually be doing right now. We pick up the phone, we start looking at emails, we’re running all the time. Really, just even five minutes staying in bed and being quiet and just letting whatever arises come into our curious space and stay curious about it and start asking, how does that relate to me and what I’m living right now?

[0:18:11] PF: How have you seen it change people? You gave us two great examples of people who have been profoundly affected by their dreams, but how have you seen it change them just in the way they move through the world?

[0:18:22] BB: I work with a lot of different people and in a lot of different ways. One of the ways I do that is I work in a coaching program and leadership development programs. I find that at the very beginning, when we start doing work, there’s a lot of parroting and groupthink. “Oh, like Bob said, I think.” But it’s not ‘I think’, it’s what Bob said. Very quickly, after two or three people go, everybody’s saying exactly the same thing.

I find that even in a short amount of time, a 10-week span, let’s say, of doing this work, people, it’s like, they come alive inside themselves and they begin to no longer groupthink, but have much more diversion thinking and are much more willing to share that with groups. Then things start to get added on to, and it becomes very energized, collaborative, creative thinking.

[0:19:21] PF: That’s exciting.

[0:19:22] BB: It is.

[0:19:23] PF: We’re living in times that are pretty tumultuous, and there’s a lot of uncertainty. I know a lot of people who are having terrible time sleeping at night, they’re not having great dreams, they’re waking up anxious. How can we use that nighttime to soothe some of those anxieties?

[0:19:41] BB: Yeah. Thank you for asking that. One of the things that I talk about in The Secret Mind is this tool called the life plan, and the life plan is a way of taking ownership of your own emotions. We tend to say, “Oh, I saw the news, and that made me mad.” In fact, we got mad, but we cannot get mad. We actually are not bound to an external thing. We are in control of our own emotions. I know that sounds crazy to say, because there’s a lot going on and it seems like we’re bounced around, like in a ping pong machine. But in fact, we can control our own emotions by understanding the origin of them and seeing them as energy.

What dreams do is they take energy and give it a form, which is an image. It’s sometimes so hard to know how we feel about something, especially in these tumultuous times. I have a lot of people saying to me these days, everything is so messed up. Well, everything is so messed up, is like this garbled ball of a lot of puzzle pieces. It’s not until we start to take out each piece, arrange things by colors and shape and form that we can start to see, oh, in fact, it’s just this one particular thing that is really messed up, and now I can solve for it.

When you start to look at the life plan as this is a waking time tool, and I can connect that to my dreaming, I have a dream and maybe there is a very angry, lashing out aspect of me, I give an example in the book of a woman who was dreaming of going into a stadium with a flamethrower and razing down the stadium.

[0:21:40] PF: We’ve all been there.

[0:21:42] BB: We have and we’ve all had that dream in one way or another. But the realization, as we looked at the dream and talked about it of, “Oh, I’m lashing out in my anger and I’m doing it with people that I don’t want to do it with.” That piece of just making the connection, if I’m dreaming it, where does that correspond to my waking time? Oh, I’m lashing out, or I’m blasting out.

[0:22:10] PF: That makes sense. Obviously, this is an incredible tool. It’s an incredible tool for self-improvement, for mental clarity, for our overall well-being. I can’t help but think what a gift it is if we can teach this to our children as they’re growing up, so they can control, or not control, they can understand what is going on within themselves. How do we do that? How do you take it down to a child’s level and let them start implementing that into their sleep practice?

[0:22:39] BB: Let me tell you, kids are fantastic. We have a whole program at my institute for young dreamers. It’s called the DYW Kids Program. Dream Your World. Working with young people is so easy, because they’re really in touch with their dreaming language, feelings, all of these things. They don’t think themselves away from something the way we adults do. When working with young people, first of all, they tell us their dreams all the time. A lot of parents just let it in one ear and out the other, because they’re thinking, “That doesn’t make sense.” When a kid is saying, “Mom, today, in the schoolyard, a big black swine came in and scared all of us kids, and we ran to the corners.” The mom is thinking, “Okay, fine.”

[0:23:33] PF: Sure, honey.

[0:23:34] BB: But in fact, that’s a real dream that one of our young dreamers brought. As we played with it, so play with it with kids. What do you want to get curious about? What if there’s something interesting about the swan? Oh, yeah, the feathers are shiny and interesting and they start to move towards and things start to shift very quickly. Turns out, that swan was a substitute teacher who was quite strict and frightening for the kids, in particular, this young dreamer. The dream resolved itself by us doing a little imaginary exercise, where she jumps on the swan’s back and they go flying together. It’s done. Kids don’t hang on to things. There was no need to ruminate, discuss where did this come from? Is something wrong with me that I can’t accept a substitute teacher? None of that. It’s just, it scared me, I fixed it. Let’s go.

[0:24:32] PF: We can all learn from that. That’s terrific. I’m going to link to that part of the program on our landing page. I’m going to link to that so we can find it, because I know we have a lot of parents listening and this would be so terrific to be able to give that gift to children.

[0:24:45] BB: Yeah. It’s just, every time we do programs, we’ve done a lot of different programs in our Young Dreamers Program. We’ve worked with kids in displaced persons camps and things like this, and they just, they move and they shift so easily. As long as anybody, but especially young people, have their imagination, they have agency. Because if we can imagine a different way of being, or imagine a different world, we can build it. When we start doing this work with young people, invariably their adult mentors or their parents say, “Can you make a class for us, too?” Because it also changes sometimes quiet children to then wanting to talk to their parents and wanting to tell their parents, “This is what I’m dreaming.” It becomes a whole family activity, really.

[0:25:42] PF: That is fascinating. I am so excited to share this with our listeners. As we let you go, is there a practice that they can adopt starting today? I’m going to tell them where to find your book, where to find you, where to learn more about this. There’s so much to dig into with it. What can they do right now tonight when they go to bed to start implementing an understanding of their dreams?

[0:26:06] BB: Two things. Starting before you go to bed, get a dream journal. Not just an old folded-up napkin that you’re going to stick next to your bed. I’ve had people bring those to my sessions before.

[0:26:18] PF: Back of the envelope thing.

[0:26:20] BB: Yes. Get an actual dream journal and start to write your dreams, no matter what it is. Include the feelings. Then the second thing, get curious about those and just hold the question in your mind, is there something I’m living in waking time that this might correspond to?

[0:26:41] PF: Beautiful. Beautiful. Bonnie, it has been a pleasure talking with you. Again, thank you for writing this book. It’s super fascinating. Really excited to share it, and really honored –

[0:26:50] BB: Thank you.

[0:26:50] PF: – to be able to sit down and talk with you about it.

[0:26:52] BB: Thank you so much. I’m super happy to be here with you and your listeners. So, thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:27:00] PF: That was Bonnie Buckner, talking about how to use our nighttime dreams to change our lives and solve pressing challenges. If you’d like to learn more about Bonnie, watch videos on how to develop your dreaming practice, follow her on social media, or check out her new book, The Secret Mind: Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform Your Life, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.

That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

How dreams can tell us more about what we need.
How to create a dreaming practice and use it to solve challenges.
How children can use dreaming as a tool for creativity and transformation.

Visit Bonnie’s website.

Learn more about dreamwork with children.

Discover her new book, The Secret Mind: Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform Your Life

Follow Bonnie on Social Media:

Facebook: @institutefordreamingandimagery
YouTube: @BonnieBuckner
Instagram: @dreamwithiidi

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