This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Decoding Your Dreams with Bonnie Buckner, PhD | 337

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Starting point is 00:00:37 you need to try tennis-sensitive care overnight pads. Its skin comfort formula acts as a barrier to help protect your skin. Try them now and have a smooth night. Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and what it feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And interestingly enough, part of woman's work could be decoding dreams, dreams that seem to make zero logical sense. Like, why am I still roaming the halls of high school? Why am I awake, angry at Jay for something he did or didn't do in my dream? And why do my dream seem to feature people I

Starting point is 00:01:29 haven't thought of in decades in completely bizarre scenarios. Are they random? Are they trying to tell me something? Or are they just proof that I'm secretly unhinged? I don't know, but I am fascinated. Here's what I do know, though. We all dream, probably every night, whether we remember them or not. And maybe, just maybe, those dreams are more than just mental leftovers or subconscious chaos. Maybe their insight. Answers. A different kind of intelligent that only shows up when we finally shut our brains off? Because what if our dreams aren't nonsense? What if they're offering something

Starting point is 00:02:08 we're too distracted, too busy, or too burnt out to access while we're awake? Here to translate the mystery of our dreams to help us solve problems is Dr. Bonnie Buckner. Bonnie is the founder and CEO of the International Institute for Dreaming and imagery where she teaches people how to use dreaming and imagery for personal growth, problem solving,

Starting point is 00:02:29 and enhanced creativity. She's also an executive coach and senior fellow at George Washington University's Center for Excellence in Public Leadership and Public Leadership and co-faculty director of their Eco Leadership Coaching Certification Program. And she's here to talk about the topic of her newest book, The Secret Mind, Unlock the Power of Your Dreams to Transform Your Life. Bonnie, thank you for being here. And I want to start by the title of your book, The Secret Mind. what does that actually mean and how is that correlated specifically with our dreams? Good morning, Nicole. Thank you so much for having me here. Actually, how you teed up this podcast is the perfect segue to talk about the secret mind because all day long we're running around

Starting point is 00:03:12 super busy. I don't know anybody that gets through their to-do list in a day. I mean, mine just if it was a scroll, it would just be unrolling for like football fields long. So all that busy, busy, busy is us using a certain part of our brain's processing system, as well as just our attention. Our attention is on that to-do list and checking things off. Inside of us are all kinds of responses and knowings and understandings and intuitions and ideas and all of these different ways that we're synthesizing are the information coming at us, the experiences we're having, we just don't stop to pay attention to it. So our dreams, we're dreaming all the time. We kind of move back and forth between those parts of our mind. There are some biological differences

Starting point is 00:04:07 when we dream at night, mostly because finally our body puts us really to sleep. We can't jump right up and go hit that to-do list anymore. So all of these understandings that I've been talking about really come to life for us, like on a movie screen, because we're finally still enough and paying attention enough to them. Okay. So I have one bazillion questions, but I want to start by talking about, I think when we think of interpreting dreams or understanding dreams or leveraging dreams, it often falls in the category of like woo-woo, right? But you're coming at this from a more scientific research perspective. Is that a fair statement?

Starting point is 00:04:54 Sure, sure. I'll play in either, but I am talking about a very practical use of our dreams. So let's go back to these people you've dreamed about from high school or a million years ago. One of the things about dreams is every aspect of the dream is an aspect of the dreamer. So you talked about people from your past,

Starting point is 00:05:18 who are in a new and bizarre circumstance. So let's say I dream about, I have a friend who's supremely laid back, and I haven't talked to him in like 15 years, but all of my understandings about him, and when we were hanging out in college together, he was just this super laid-back dude. Well, one time he showed up in my dreams

Starting point is 00:05:41 in a really tight button-down three-piece suit and tie. So there's something about the way I've understood him as super laid back and how he's showing up now in a different circumstance that gives me a clue that there's an aspect of me that is laid back that is now really buttoned up and tight in some kind of way. So if I just play with these images, it's a language of images and that's what throws people off. But nowadays, we do understand images. We play with emojis and, you know, memes float around. And we do understand images. So if we just stay in that, not think about it too hard, what part of me is normally laid back about things and is now like super tight about something? And if we just play and ask that question, we can draw the line between that and our daily life and find where,

Starting point is 00:06:43 maybe there's a little knot that we can untangle. So there are several things that I like about everything that you just said. First, the point that you make about it being about the dreamer. So how if 10 people had the same exact dream, it might mean 10 different things to those 10 different people based on what's going on in their world. Is that fair? Yeah, everything is subjective.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Okay. And then that leads me to the other part of the word, play was, I think, a wonderful choice because there might be the tendency to get a little too literal with our dreams or that there might be one obvious answer, whereas it's probably telling us something that we might need to play with a little bit or test out a little bit to determine what it means or even maybe what we want it to mean. Absolutely. You know, where many people start to get the little hiccups in their life is by getting too tight to begin with and seeing things from just one perspective. So one of the great things about dreams, in the

Starting point is 00:07:55 scenario I just gave you, there were other people in that dream. So I have a lot of different perspectives in me available at any moment. We make ourselves narrow by sort of just getting into a rut of this is how I am, this is how I'm always going to be, you know, this is my go-to personality at work or whatever, but we're so much more than that. And so one of the things that Dreams does is sort of pick our curiosity if we allow it to to different facets that are available in us. Okay, so can we use an example that I know I dream of women, maybe not a lot, but frequently enough to it jumps to my mind that I would imagine many other people do, which is I'm dreaming about somebody that you have a lot of trust or care with doing something in your dream they

Starting point is 00:08:53 wouldn't normally do. So I give the example of, you know, sometimes I wake up and tell my husband Jay, he was really mean to me in my dream last night. And like I actually have a hard time not being momentarily angry at him. I know we all feel bad for him. For many. reasons. Or like he cheated on me, which in my waking hours, this is not a concern that I have. Do I know that it's possible in the realm of possible? Sure, just like for anybody, but this is not something in my waking hours that I worry about. And yet I'll still have a dream. I have moments where I'm like, is it is my subconscious trying to tell me something? And I'm like, yes, but maybe not directly what it's trying to tell me. So how can we play with things like that to determine

Starting point is 00:09:40 in which interpretation might be most accurate or maybe more most helpful. That is such a great question. So let's get Jay, give him a whole test right now. Let's help him. So when we dream about somebody we know, that morning, we've written down the dream. I'm assuming everybody's writing down their dreams.

Starting point is 00:10:04 If not, please, listeners, just get a dream journal, start to write down your dreams. That is so very important. And just that alone is going to open you out to a much greater avenue of creativity. But then, so we write down the dream, Jay has done something, you know, devious in the dream. Yeah, terrible. Sorry, Jay. We just ask ourselves the question, Jay is the kind of person who, and we fill it out that morning.

Starting point is 00:10:34 So like I gave with my friend Jim, Jim is the kind of person who is just always laid back. So whatever that day you're feeling Jay is a kind of person who fill in that gap, that means that's an aspect of me. So whatever aspect of me that is, if it's the always laid back and now it's cheating on me, then that part of me is no longer laid back. It's cheating on me in a different way. I'm no longer exercising that aspect of me. Does that make sense? It does. But then again, maybe because my brain is, or I tell myself the story that my brain is a little bit more literal, then I'm like, does it mean that I'm, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:19 doing something that I shouldn't be or like that, you know, then I start going. So think about cheating in a bigger way. First of all, let me come back to the cheating thing because, you know, that definitely wakes us up. And so one of the things that dreams do, they're very clever. And if they were just, you know, copacetic and nice,

Starting point is 00:11:40 and chill, we probably wouldn't remember our dreams. But because they give us a little juice, they get us upset about something, or there's a big emotion, we wake up to them and we actually listen to what they're trying to tell us. So if I, for example, am someone who is naturally outgoing and I'm pulling back that aspect of myself, I'm hiding that aspect of myself, for whatever reason there's a situation at my work or whatever, but I'm not being authentic. Then that part of me, I'm cheating on myself in some way. You follow me? Yes. I'm not being my true self. And so there is a disconnect in me that my dream is trying to get me to see. And I am emotional about it because anytime we're not living our true self, it's upsetting to us. We tell ourselves all kinds of

Starting point is 00:12:39 things, yeah, but that boss is whatever. I have to, but it's a disconnect. And it's, it's a problem for ourself. That really lands for me because when it comes to, I'm going to use the word betrayal. When it comes to that, I'm far more likely to do it to myself than I am anyone in my life. And I could see how that is unconscious or subconscious way of waking me up to where I am potentially, well, there's lots of ways I could be doing this, right, but potentially betraying myself in some way. Okay. So you mentioned this earlier and that was going to be one of my questions with the dream journal. First, there are a lot of dreams that I don't remember or that I'll remember in the middle of the night, but then by the time I wake up in the morning, like, what was that

Starting point is 00:13:26 about? I wanted to remember that one. So my question is twofold. If we have dreams that we don't remember, is that just an assumption that, you know, we don't need to do something with that yet or that it's not that important or it's just that our subconscious is processing something that we don't need to be woken up to yet? And then my second question is, if we do dream something in the middle of the night, would you recommend waking up and writing it in our dream journal then or waiting to see if it sticks with us in the morning? Okay. Let's come back to how busy we are. So we are dreaming every night. Everybody dreams and everybody dreams every night. It's a question of just dream recall. And so how do we recall dreams? We recall dreams if we think they're important and if we set the intention to do so. Even when they do the dream research in sleep labs, people will come in saying, oh, I never ever dream. But because now they're in the lab, of course they dream. It's just as simple as giving people a little nudge. So if you get a dream journal, keep it by your bed and start to just write

Starting point is 00:14:34 down whatever comes up, even if it's like, why is that song in my head? Write it down. Because also the words might have some kind of meaning if you kind of sit with them a little bit. Once you get into that practice, you'll recall more and more and more of your dreams. So back to your second question, yes, write it down in the middle of the night. And once you get into a practice of writing your dreams. It'll get to where you probably don't have to write it down in the middle of the night. People get worried, oh, I'm going to wake up and then I won't go back to sleep. You will. But also very quickly, you'll just get in the habit of writing them down when you wake up in the morning. Okay. I want to talk about really the subtitle of your book, how unlocking the power

Starting point is 00:15:15 of your dreams to transform your life. Before I do, though, I want to be careful that I don't hijack this podcast with my dreams, right? What are some common examples of dreams that you hear and what we might be looking for, like we use the example of the betrayal or cheating, what are some examples that you hear a lot that we might want to be thinking about? I hear a lot, well, first of all, if I had a dollar for every toilet dream,

Starting point is 00:15:43 that would be go to the bank. Toilets that are too full and need to be flushed is definitely a common dream. And that is so simple. We don't even have to think about that. How much would you love to just sweep everything off of your desk? That would be akin to flushing a full toilet. We just overload ourselves. Our, you know, inbox, let's say, is just way more than our outbox. So, yeah, way too much shit in our lives, right? Okay, thanks for saying that, yes. I'm trying to be podcast appropriate, but yes, that's exactly correct. So if we think about that, you asked about the subtitle of the book, how are we using dreams to transform our lives? The most important thing is to make the connection between what am I dreaming at night and what am I living in the day? Because they're exactly the same thing.

Starting point is 00:16:41 It's just that what we live in the day, we're accustomed to, it's linear, it's verbal, it's visual. and what we dream at night, even though we're seeing images, it's also very emotional, is that kind of just murky inner knowing feelings, but it's the same thing. And so if I've got that toilet that needs to be flushed, I can close my eyes and imagine flushing it. That's already going to shift my emotional feeling of my inner self. And then I have to do the sort of cognitive work of thinking, like, what is all that stuff in my life that I need to really pay attention to and just pull it back, maybe take a mental health day, whatever is needed for me at that moment

Starting point is 00:17:30 and time. TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs, no matter the stage of, business you're in. Visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Okay, so let's talk about some of that cognitive work. Obviously, you've already talked about writing down our dreams. I would imagine there's an element of

Starting point is 00:18:10 not judging them, right? Just whatever they are, writing them down, letting them be. Then what do we do? What are some of the questions we ask or work that we can or should be doing to help learn whatever message our inner knowing is trying to tell us? Yeah, so one of the ways, and this is really where I say that dreamers become very courageous because, you know, I can't change what I'm denying. And part of why we run around so busy is because it's nice to distract ourselves from really looking inside. And that's one reason why I like doing this dream work with people, because it is so playful. It's not a heavy hammer. And it's a light sort of playful way of saying, oh, look, are you maybe, you know, betraying some aspect of yourself? Is it time to reach out in a new way?

Starting point is 00:19:07 Is it time to exercise a different part of yourself? I have people who come to me and they have a dream and it's been an emotional dream. and they suddenly say, you know, if I could do anything with my life right now, I would like to be playing the piano more. That's simple. It really only takes maybe 15, 30 minutes a day. So if we just allow ourselves to get a little bit curious about the feeling part of dreams, the emotional part of dreams, and just ask those kinds of questions, if I could really feel this feeling or if it's like the anxiety, dream we talked about. If I'm feeling anxious about showing up somewhere, where is that showing up in my waking time and how can I resolve that for myself? I feel like this question might be kind of obvious, but I'm going to ask it anyway. So let's say people do this, we do this. In what ways

Starting point is 00:20:05 does it transform our lives? In what ways does this allow for breakthroughs in our waking days? Yeah, you know, I was thinking about that actually all weekend long because I was with my family. I'm traveling right now. I was with my family and everybody was talking about big things happening in the world right now. And I was thinking about how immediately people jump to the very biggest thing. And they say, oh, well, that's too big. And then go back to just, I'm going to be in a rut. We change our lives and the lives of those around us with, very tiny little movements. If I just flush the toilet and that's what my dream is asking me to do, I'm suddenly more available for every single person around me as well as myself. If that toilet is full, I'm not going to get that next great idea that's going to move my life forward. And by next great idea, I'm not talking Mozart. I'm talking about my next great idea that, oh, now it's time to, you know, start this podcast like you did, or now it's time to write a book, or it's time to just call that friend I haven't talked to in a really long

Starting point is 00:21:20 time. When we're so busy, we don't get these messages, and those messages are truly life-changing. Yeah, it's interesting as you were talking. I was reminded of something I say a lot when it comes to confidence, and it's this idea that we have that it needs to be big in order for it to count, right? And everything in my experience says it's the little small steps, little risks built up overtime lead to big confidence or like, how do we do anything? It's like one foot in front of the other yet we have the tendency to look at the milestone moment or the peak or whatever and think that that's the sum of the work as opposed to, I think what you're saying is it's small tweaks, create big impact, not just for ourselves, but as you see, as you

Starting point is 00:22:07 said for the people around us. And that's how we change things in big ways is by doing small things. Yeah, exactly. I and this woman come to me. She and her husband are both working. They're both really big into their career. And they had hidden a sort of impasse. And she was like, he's just not listening. And, you know, in parentheses, I'm right. He's wrong. Obviously. Right. And then she has a dream that he's wearing a white suit that's full of diamond. There's diamonds all around him. And as we were talking, she said, I just realize I'm actually not even listening to the valuable, precious things he's bringing to the table in this conversation. Like, I'm just so busy and I'm so focused on what I'm getting done.

Starting point is 00:22:54 I'm not even listening. And just that recognition shifted everything. It opened them up. They've now moved on. They're buying a house. Like, things have shifted in a dramatic way for them. Yeah, a good example. I think, again, many of us can relate.

Starting point is 00:23:13 So let me ask a few questions that popped into my head. So first, repetitive dreams. I think we all have an example of a dream that we have over and over again or some version of a dream we have over and over again. Is that a lesson we haven't learned yet? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's just like our dreams are kind of like stalkers in a way. It's like, okay, we gave you a dream. You didn't pay attention to us. So now we're going to give it to you again. And maybe we're going to just tweak it just a little bit and kind of keep hammering away until you pay attention to it. Yeah. Well, I think that happens in our waking hours too. Like I always think, you know, before I met Jay, it basically dated the exact same guy in different forms over and over and over again because it was.

Starting point is 00:24:02 It was like I refuse to learn the lesson that I needed to learn in order to even create the opportunity for somebody like Jay to come into my life. That's a great example. Okay, so then what about nightmares? The reality is many people have experienced extreme trauma, and I have to imagine that's some way of the brain and body processing what they've gone through, but what do we do with nightmares?

Starting point is 00:24:28 Is it the same thing as with dreams, or is that to be treated differently in some way? Same thing. And we're going to go back to the example you gave of dating all these guys before Jay. So first of all, just in a normal circumstance, nightmares are counterintuitively our friends. So they are acute emotional experiences that are trying to wake us up to something in waking time. So there's a dream I recount in the book of a woman who came to me that she had walked into the stadium and then suddenly had a fire blaster and was just like blasting away and raising the stadium. And she felt super bad about that. And as we got to talking in

Starting point is 00:25:13 the session, she was realizing, oh, I am so angry in my life. I just thought I was dealing with it. I thought I was putting a lid on it. But in fact, I'm lashing out, which is like for her blasting out with the fire flamethrower at everybody in my family, my work, everybody. So that, a cute dream because it was so shocking to her, frankly, and plugged her into that emotion because she wasn't aware of it in waking time. This is the thing. Back to your question on what does it mean the secret mind, we're not aware often of everything we're doing. Just like right now, we don't know what the back of our head looks like for having a good hair day or bad hair day. We have to have a mirror. And dreams are that mirror for us. So the thing about

Starting point is 00:25:59 nightmares is they're there for us to resolve something. Either we can go back into the nightmare itself. I've had people come to me with a dream. I'm walking up to a dark house and I'm really scared and I wake up. They can go back in, walk up to the house with a light, a flashlight. And frequently, just going back into the dream with the light, the entire scenario changes. And most people are afraid, yeah, but if I go in, turn them light, what am I going to see? It's often just the need to turn a light onto something and then things shift. But also in waking time, the person with the flamethrower, she was able to make those corrections in waking time knowing, okay, I have to really deal with my anger issues at the core and what's causing them. So back to the guys you dated before Jay.

Starting point is 00:26:56 That's really... Kissing frogs. That's really such a great example because in our dream times, you know, we may start out with a lot of nightmares or busy dreams or things like that, the patterns, the repetitive themes. And then when we resolve them, we open ourselves to having those bigger dreams. I call them great dreams or even clear dreams. that are showing us latent potentials.

Starting point is 00:27:26 And that's where we get to really changing our life. We've got to kind of clean up the house before we can start to bring in new and exciting furniture or kiss a lot of frogs before we get to the Jays. Yeah. Okay. My last question is around, okay, so I have beef with a lot of industries right now, but with the personal development industry specifically,

Starting point is 00:27:49 I have a beef with this idea that any one of us will ever be or become fully healed, right? Like this idea that if you do this thing or if you interpret all your dreams or if you address every whatever that like at some point will be, and I put air quotes done. And that just is impossible and not truthful and there is no program we can do or supplement we can take or anything along those lines. So with dreaming, I want to just, just so people don't think, like, if we do all this work that we will never dream again, or the absence of dreams means that everything's good in your life, what is the goal here? Is it just self-awareness? I mean, not just. That's a big goal. But what are- You know what? Let's just forget goal, because that's the whole problem with this I'm headed towards perfection thing, which I'm totally on your same page. We're never done. And by the way, how boring would that be? Yeah. Nobody wants to be done. Life is exciting. And so I might have resolved a lot of nightmares and get to a great dream. If I do that, then I'm going to start living a new potential, which means a whole new set of challenges is going to come my way. For example, I just wrote this book. I may have done a lot of clearing to write this book, but now the book is out in the world.

Starting point is 00:29:16 I'm interfacing with a lot of people. So no challenges. So every time we sort of, you know, it's like a spiral. We go up maybe one level in the spiral and then there's whole new challenges and maybe we have nightmares all over again, but they're different because we've kind of evolved. We're in a new place, but we're not done, not ever. Yeah. Okay, I said that was going to be my last question, but another one triggered. We didn't talk about good dreams. Again, I would imagine the process is the same. we write in our dream journal and ask some questions, but is there anything that good dreams, joyful dreams, are telling us differently? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:29:56 So first of all, I use that word, the phrase, latent potentials. We have so many aspects of ourselves that we don't exercise, that we can exercise, but somewhere down the line we threw, you know, into the back corner because someone made a feel like we can't be that person or show those talents in this time place. So that's also part of resurrecting the self, coming back to all those things that we loved, but then someone ridiculed us, or we were told you'll never make money doing that, or whatever that might be, right? Girls are supposed to be nice. They're not supposed to speak out. Whatever all those social family conformity things are. So we have to resurrect all of that.

Starting point is 00:30:44 but then also really great dreams that open us out to something so much bigger than just our lives, so much bigger than that to-do list, places of awe and wonder, joy. These are also human emotions and part of the human experience, and we don't get those often enough these days. And the more we do have those experiences and dreams, the more we begin to see, the more we begin to see those miraculous things in our everyday life. And I have so many students say to me things. I had a guy tell me recently, you know, I was with my son and we were by a pond and these herons came. And he said, it was like time stopped. And I saw it all so much more colorfully than I would

Starting point is 00:31:33 ever have done had I not been doing this dream work. I love that. It's nice. I also imagine that it because, as you said, we're dreaming all the time, it's sort of like one feeds the other. So if we choose wonder and awe or joy in moments in our waking lives, does that trigger more of those opportunities in our dreams and vice versa? Yes. And that's another way we transform both our own lives and those around us. Find this wildly fascinating. I'm ordering your book the second we get off. So let me just remind everybody. It's called the secret mind. And Bonnie's website is Bonniebuckner.com. We'll put all the links and all the ways to find and follow Bonnie in show notes. Bonnie, thank you for being our guest and for helping talk through all the things that are

Starting point is 00:32:27 happening in all the places. Exactly. Thanks so much for having me on. This has been great. My pleasure. All right. I'm going to close us out with a curious thought. What if the answers you're looking for aren't out there, but in you, sometimes playing out behind your eyelids while you sleep. What if clarity, creativity, and direction aren't things that you have to chase, but things you just have to slow down enough to notice? Maybe our dreams aren't just weird. Maybe they're wise. But also, let's not get carried away. Not every dream is literal. Dreams don't always speak in facts. They speak in feelings and symbols in the stuff that we're not fully processing during our waking hours. I don't have the answers, but I do know this. Listening to yourself,

Starting point is 00:33:12 your instincts, your intuition, your inner knowing, that will always be part of what it means to be doing woman's work.

This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Decoding Your Dreams with Bonnie Buckner, PhD | 337

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