The Secret Mind: Unlocking the Wisdom of Your Dreams (Bonnie Buckner) - Episode 222

What if the answers you’ve been searching for are already inside you… waiting to be discovered while you sleep?

In this episode of Seeking Center, we’re joined by Bonnie Buckner, PhD, author of The Secret Mind: Unlock the Power of Your Dreams to Transform Your Life. Bonnie is the founder of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery and has spent decades helping people access the powerful guidance hidden within their dreams.

According to Bonnie, dreaming isn’t random—and it isn’t just symbolic. Our dreams are a doorway into what she calls the “secret mind,” the deeper part of ourselves that already knows how to solve problems, spark creativity, and guide us toward our purpose.

In this fascinating conversation, we explore how dreams can help us better understand ourselves, unlock new ideas, and even transform the way we move through life.

If you’ve ever woken up from a vivid dream and wondered what that was all about, this episode may change the way you look at dreaming forever.

IN THIS EPISODE WE EXPLORE:

• What the “Secret Mind” really is: The deeper intelligence inside us that communicates through dreams.
• Why dreams aren’t random: How neuroscience, psychology, and ancient traditions all point to the transformative power of dreaming.
• How dreams can solve problems and spark creativity
• What recurring dreams might be trying to tell you
• How to start remembering and working with your dreams
• Why imagination plays a powerful role in becoming who you’re meant to be

A QUESTION TO REFLECT ON
Before you go to sleep tonight, ask yourself: “What might my dreams be trying to tell me?” You may be surprised by what shows up.

ABOUT BONNIE BUCKNER PhD
Bonnie Buckner, PhD is the founder and CEO of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery and the author of The Secret Mind. She has spent decades researching the science and psychology of dreaming and helping people harness their dreams as a tool for creativity, personal insight, and transformation.

Her work blends neurobiology, social psychology, and ancient wisdom traditions to show how dreams can guide us toward our fullest potential.

Visit bonniebuckner.com to find out more about Bonnie's offerings, her book The Secret Mind: Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform Your Life, the Institute and more. 

Visit seekingcentercommunity.com for more with Robyn + Karen and many of the guides on Seeking Center: The Podcast. You'll get access to live weekly sessions, intuitive guidance, daily inspiration, and a space to share your journey with like-minded people who just get it.

You can also follow Seeking Center on Instagram @theseekingcenter.

Transcript

Robyn: [00:00:00] I'm Robyn Miller Brecker and I'm Karen Loenser. Welcome to Seeking Center, the podcast. Join us each week as we have the conversations and we, through the spiritual and holistic clutter for you, we'll boil it down to what you need to know now, we're all about total wellness, which to us needs building a healthy life.

Karen: On a physical, mental, and spiritual level, we'll talk to the trailblazers who'll introduce you to the practices, products, and experiences that may be just what you need to hear about to transform your life. If you're listening to this, it's no accident. Think of this as your seeking center and your place to seek your center.

Robyn: And for the best wellness and spiritual practitioners, experts, products, experiences, and inspo, visit theseekingcenter. com. Today's conversation feels like an invitation straight from your subconscious. We're joined by Bonnie Buckner, PhD, author of The Secret Mind. Unlock the Power of Your Dreams to Transform Your Life. Founder and CEO of the International [00:01:00] Institute for Dreaming and Imagery. And a creative dream expert who has spent decades helping leaders, creatives, and seekers across the globe harness the power of their dreams.

Bonnie teaches what we all have, what she calls a secret mind, a part of us that already knows how to solve our problems, unlock our creativity, and guide us toward our great dream of self and the doorway to that secret mind. Our dreams draw drawing from neurobiology.

Social psychology, ancient wisdom, traditions, and practical tools. Bonnie shows us how dreaming isn't random. It's transformational. It's not just about symbolism, it's about purpose. It's about imagination. It's about becoming who you came here to be. So today we're diving into the power of dreams and maybe even waking up to something that's been trying to get your attention all along.

Hi, Bonnie. 

Bonnie: Hi. Hi. Great to see y'all. 

Robyn: We were just saying we're so excited to meet you after reading the [00:02:00] book and knowing about your work. We are very excited to dive in. 

Bonnie: Great. 

Karen: Yeah and before today, I didn't know there was an International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery, like even that in itself, that there's this destination that you have created with your colleagues where people can actually dive in and really research this.

Yeah. This is where we get excited about learning more. 

Bonnie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Robyn: So you've dedicated your life to dream work. How did you first discover the power of dreams and was there a specific moment in your life that woke you up to wanting to do this for your, for life? 

Bonnie: Yeah, actually when I was three years old, I had this moment of realization I'd been having nightmares and I started to think about that and from a little kid perspective, I was like, can I just never go to sleep again?

And I was working my mind through that. And then there was just this, oh, it hit me. This is what I'm here to [00:03:00] do. I have to figure out how to master my nightmares and I'll teach that to other people. And it was like just a dragonfly. Touching water. It didn't, I didn't hold it like a heavy thing.

I was just like, okay, dreams are my thing and. Fortunately for me, my father and my grandmother were big dreamers, and as I began to talk to them about my dreams, they shared dreams with me where they solved problems in their waking time where they felt like something miraculous had happened or they.

Atory that you know, that they understood because of their dreams. So it became conversational. And then I did other things. I, every person goes through that. What am I gonna do when I grow up thing? And so I've worked in different areas. And then. I found my dream teacher Dr. Katherine Shamberg, who spoke in a way that made sense to me how I understood dreams.

And it was just, I liked it and I really thought what she was teaching was super deep. And so I [00:04:00] began studying with her and went back to school, got my PhD, and then did dreaming. 

Karen: Wow. Wow. What did you get your PhD in? How does that connect to dreaming dream work? 

Bonnie: I got my PhD in Psychology with an emphasis in media, and it was a really interesting program at Fielding Graduate University, which was the first ever university dedicated to positive psychology, and it was an interdisciplinary degree, which allowed me, what I really focused on was the cognitive and neuropsychology of image.

So dreams are composed of images and I was interested in how images move us and how we understand images. 

Karen: Wow that's so fascinating, really. Like you could actually get a degree like that. So that, that in itself is fascinating. We love this idea. The title of your book is The Secret Mind.

What is the Secret Mind? What do you mean by that? And how is that different from our everyday conscious thinking Mind? 

Bonnie: [00:05:00] So the secret mind, and it is right there, but we don't pay attention to it. And there's moments when we do, there's, I'll give a couple of examples. Sometimes, I dunno. If y'all have ever been in the shower and you're relaxed, you're not thinking and all of a sudden you get it, there's this idea, or you've solved a problem or something pops in your head.

That popping into your head is a form of cognition and neurologically it's from our default network and it thinks in image. And the other times that we touch on that is when we just know and we say it often in things like we say, that doesn't really work for me. We say it in the negative.

How do we know that? Because somewhere inside of herself we do know. We know what. Works for us, what doesn't? So the secret mind is a way of connecting with that inner knowing and that inner insight and the sort of like pivot point between our inner knowing and our conscious mind is [00:06:00] image. So it's about learning to think and image work and image, and that helps us move back and forth between this inner knowing and outer doing 

Robyn: that is so interesting and I, it also makes me.

It makes me wanna ask you about people who say they don't see images that's hard for them. How, what would you say to those people? A lot of times Karen and I have talked to people and if they're in some sort of dream state, they will say they, they first of all will get to this, but that they don't remember their dreams, that's something different.

But for those who say they aren't able to see images in their. In their mind's eye, what would you say to that? 

Bonnie: I just read a whole study on this. So they studied people who say that, and for many of them they see without seeing, if you ask them to describe something, they'll describe it, but they'll say, oh, I didn't [00:07:00] see it in my mind, but clearly they're seeing something and describing it.

So it's an interesting thing that science is starting to scratch the surface on right now. I know that for me in my practice in doing this, there are people that at the beginning they say, I don't see anything in my mind's eye. I'll just do a little thing like close your eyes and see a bird and describe it to me.

All I've said is see a bird, but they'll say it's got yellow feathers and it's got, so they're describing something and then from then it's oh, I do see, and it grows, so it's. Not something that most of us are used to. We're used to thinking in words and numbers and Yes, 

it's getting used to it. 

Robyn: I ask that too, because it's how they express it and like that is seeing, it's just what is our definition of that 

Bonnie: Yeah. 

Robyn: And then you say that, accessing that secret mind can help us solve problems or come up with solutions that we can't seem to find when [00:08:00] we're awake.

How does that work? 

Karen: And Bonnie, before you answer that, just to clarify, 'cause I'm just thinking out loud, the secret mind is not necessarily a dream, right? 

Bonnie: It's both. 

Karen: Okay. It's 

Bonnie: the same thing. So we're dreaming all the time. We're dreaming right now.

It's happening. It's the ticker tape in the background. This world of spontaneous images that are letting us know how we feel about certain things, how we're thinking about certain things, making sense of it. When we go to sleep, it's easier to access. ' cause right now we're busy, but when we're asleep, we're quiet.

And so all of those images come to the foreground. It's in daytime, you know the moon is there, but you're not seeing it because the light is so bright. It's the same thing. We are such busy people, but when we learn in waking time to get quiet, close our eyes and look inside, we can access it.

Karen: thanks for clarifying that. I think that's so important. 

Bonnie: Thanks for asking that. 

Robyn: and I [00:09:00] love that visual and just the idea of, remember that the moon is always there, we just can't see it. 

 Yeah. During the day Thank you for that. 

Bonnie: anytime we slide off, in the world of science, mind wandering, daydreaming are actual states and it's the dream state, and there it's activating that same default network that gets activated when we're dreaming. So I gave the. Shower example, I have a client who says, oh yeah, when I file my nails, 'cause I stop thinking and then all of a sudden all this knowing and understanding comes up.

So any moment we just stop, focusing and let our mind gaze out the window and that's when we're there. 

Karen: I think for some people will say it's when they're driving. If they're not listening to the radio or I go for my run in the morning and that's for where all my stuff comes from.

'cause I'm, 

Bonnie: But here's the thing, the reason it's the secret mind is because we don't always pay attention to that. the next time you go on a run, think without thinking. Just pretend that [00:10:00] you're fishing and the great idea that pops up, grab it. And then do something with it.

That's the only thing, because we often just keep right on going super fast and that little idea that pops up, we dismiss it, judge it, edit it, or just don't even pay attention to it. 

Robyn: I think you're giving people such a different perspective on those moments because I believe we all have those and Oh yeah.

Have never thought about it that way. It's just to me, how. In my own life when someone helped me understand energy and that we are made of energy and what does that mean? And there's different ways to look at that. It changes the way that you look at yourself. And I think the way that you're describing the secret mind helps us look at our thoughts and those ideas in such a different way.

Bonnie: energy is a great way to talk about this because energy is difficult for us to see. It's like wind. We only know wind because we see the leaves move. We know [00:11:00] energy because we have an emotion, so it's like speeds up and gets intense. We call that anger or we call that fear. Love, how do we know?

Because it's moving our heart in some way, but it's energy. So what images are is the beginning of something coming into form and it's showing us these images of our dreams are showing us the energies inside of ourself and how they're moving. And it includes, memories that we have and things that we know and experiences we've had.

 Seeing a bear in a dream, for example. People might say, that is so weird, but look at the energy of that bear and what is that bear doing in that moment, in that dream? And as soon as we start to get a beat on that, we start to understand how is that mirroring back me? Is this an energy of mind that's become too intense?

Is it an energy of mine that's blocked? Is it an energy that's great potential that I'm not paying [00:12:00] attention to in my daytime that I should be paying attention to? 

Robyn: Wow. Yes, what you just said made me want to also bring up this idea of symbology and dreams and how some people may say. Can't I just go look at a dream dictionary and you tell me what a bear means, but to what you're saying, it's like how does that bear make you feel? For every person that's gonna be different, and so symbols in general can be different for every person.

Bonnie: And what I'm talking about is not symbols at all, but images. And so 

Robyn: thank you. Yes. 

Bonnie: My life experience and my understanding of bears is gonna be totally different from everybody else in the world. 

 And again. What I dream today is gonna be different from what I dream in two weeks from now or last week.

So dream dictionaries are very static and rigid, and the whole point of dreams is to be in our present tense and to mirror our present [00:13:00] tense. And that's a hundred percent subjective and contextual. 

Karen: and I think people will be surprised. i've just lately started writing down my dreams. Don't always remember them, but I try, like everybody else, I do it immediately when I wake up and I'm so blown away how it's.

not a reoccurring dream necessarily, but the message is reoccurring and it comes out in different ways. Although there'll be some symbols that'll reoccur, like for whatever it is. Lately I've been trying to find something to wear. Interesting. I like, sometimes it's like digging through a bag in the attic and finding an old dress that I love and I still wanna wear.

And then other times it's not being able to find any clothes or not having enough time to pick something out and be ready. And just something like that. It's just really fascinating to try to dig into why, what does that mean for me? To your point, like not taking it as a symbol. What does it mean for me and why does this message keep coming up and how do I decipher it?

Bonnie: So what we wear is really about what we're putting out there in the [00:14:00] world. So a question and we were talking earlier about. People who say they don't see. And one way to also get into our inner seeing is through feeling. So that old dress that I haven't worn in forever that I loved, what is the feeling of that?

 And why did I love it so much? And what's happened today that's different from then when I was wearing it and loving it? What is that of me? That's one way to 

Robyn: play with this. Absolutely. 

Karen: I have goosebumps actually. Why wouldn't you just, yes, and I'm so glad I've been writing it down because how quickly we just dismiss it.

Oh yeah, I had this dream, and you just move on when it is that secret mind of yours just trying to tap you on the shoulder and say, look. I have that answer for you. I have that information to help you process what you're going through. And I love what you just said. ' cause Robyn's nodding and she knows exactly what you're talking about.

Robyn: because I know that can invoke that feeling. And then that can really help you understand why it's important right now to your point, to the present day. Like why is [00:15:00] that coming up for you now in your life? 

Karen: Right its identity, its memory of past identity versus current identity.

Robyn: Yeah. 

Karen: About shifting gears and will I have enough time to show up it's so fascinating if you just take a minute to capture it and process it a little bit. 

Bonnie: And here's the thing, you can transform that dream by choosing, actively choosing going back in your dream.

So just close your eyes, not this second. Do it for yourself, but just close your eyes, breathe out three times slowly, and go back into the dream and make it concerted effort to just choose what you want to choose and put it on and see how you feel. And you may be very surprised what you pick up may change, because that's the nature of spontaneous images.

Robyn: Wow, that's cool. That is really cool. We're gonna do that. 

Bonnie: It shift everything. It does 

Robyn: shift. 

Bonnie: Everything 

Robyn: does well. and in terms of coming up with solutions for issues that you may be having in your life, is that one way that you can [00:16:00] help do that? which is you could be having a dream. where you see this old dress and you put it on and you make the concerted effort to go put it on and see how you feel and really. Think about that, and maybe that helps you come up with a solution to a problem, or would you also recommend setting an intention before you go to sleep?

how does someone get intentional with that? 

Bonnie: Okay. So let's back up for one second. Yeah. Because there's five different things I wanna say today. Okay. The first thing is what I described about going back into the dream. That's a waking dream exercise. So there are things our dreams want us to do.

They want us to dialogue with them. it's not like Netflix. They're an interactive way of working with ourself. So I'll put it in these terms. We have homeostasis. So if I'm too hot, I start to sweat and that brings my temperature down. If I'm too cold, I shiver and I get a little [00:17:00] warmer.

Dreams are part of that mechanism for the other parts of ourself. The emotional parts of ourself, the mental parts of ourself are spiritual self, and so our dreams are gonna show us, Hey, you're a little blocked here, or You're off balance here. And so they're asking us to actually. Interact to bring ourselves back to balance.

 And balance is very often unlocking potential, which is disruptive in the sense that we're gonna then change something in our waking time. But that is fluid and healthy, let's say. And so when we're looking at dreams, one way to. Unlock them is to go in and work with them. An example, there was a time in my life when I had a really amazing business partner.

He was super, super smart, but I deferred everything to him and I had this dream that I was in his [00:18:00] backyard and there was this overhang that's not there in waking time, and this tiny little plant that was under the overhang, in the shadow, getting no sun. That's a pretty obvious dream, what needs to happen, and I could totally understand that was me staying little and small because I just saw him as being like so smart and knowing so many things.

 So it's very simple. I went back into that dream and I moved the plant to be in the sun. So in my waking time, all of that just unlocks a tremendous amount of understanding. Not only does it energetically unlock our potential from being small to big, because as soon as I moved that plant, it grew, changed my posture, changed my energy, changed our working relationship.

 But it's also about unlocking. The block, meaning when you're talking about what are the solutions, very frequently the solution is not a literal thing. Like I need to find a [00:19:00] different wrench and a different, no, it's mostly unlocking ourself because we're blocking ourself and in that particular situation, the more I showed up, the more he noticed and said, I was waiting for you to start to, bring more to it.

 But why do we. Hold ourselves back. Many reasons. I thought he was so smart. How could I possibly, maybe if I start speaking up more, it's gonna rock the boat. Usually. It's totally contrary. It's welcomed. Let's do this, let's go and everything gets much better. 

Robyn: What a fabulous, 

Bonnie: that's two out of Yeah. 

Robyn: I keep thinking about how we have all these things almost in a vault.

That's how it feels

Bonnie: yeah. 

Robyn: These things are in a vault. And to your point, if you can make that choice and change something about it, It then moves to a different, almost part within you, like somewhere deep inside. it's like , literally a piece of you that then gets turned on.

Yes. Or turned off. That's a great 

Bonnie: way to put it. 

Robyn: Whichever way it needs to work [00:20:00] for you. And that, it like resets yourselves in some way so that it does, you can energetically feel different. 

Karen: , I just wanna make sure I'm following.

So in that example, when you woke up with that dream and you said you went back and you put yourself in the sun, is that like a meditation that you did to revisit the dream? 

Bonnie: It's this fast. first of all, I laid there a minute, like absorbing it, and I was so moved by the dream emotionally. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm doing this.

Which is the other great things that dreams do for us because we often are so unaware of the patterns or beliefs that we're living out until. It's put back in front of us like a mirror. So first I woke up with a big whoa aha, then I did exactly what I described to you earlier. I closed my eyes, breathed out three times, went back in and just interacted with the images.

I saw the plant that was under the overhang and the shadow. I scooped it up, I moved it in [00:21:00] the sun, I planted it, and everything changed. In the scene that I was seeing it, the plant grew really tall, became a tree, and as soon as I saw that everything shifted energetically and physically in my body, I breathed out and opened my eyes.

Robyn: Wow. 

Bonnie: It's really quick. It's less than a minute. 

Robyn: another question I wanna ask you. How would you compare? What we're talking about with the secret mind to intuition.

Are they the same? 

Bonnie: They're the same to me. Intuition is something that play with the words. Intuition. It's an inner teaching and it's usually, we experience intuition when there's something that's quite strong I really need to call this friend of mine.

And then we pick up the phone to call and they're like, I was just dialing your number. So it's knocking on our door a little bit more than our. All the time. Images and dreaming. Yeah.

Robyn: Thank you. 

Karen: And the people Like me, even who wake up and maybe don't always understand immediately . Like [00:22:00] you just having this conversation with me about my clothes, I'm like, yeah. Okay. Now that makes sense. Do you have any tips for how people can start to discern and translate that symbology so that they can start to action it?

' cause sometimes things seem really bizarre, 

Robyn: And to that, do you. Feel like imagery and symbology are different or are they the same? 

Bonnie: Yes. Now 

 Let's back up. First of all, 

How do you remember your dreams? Let's go there. 

Robyn: Okay. Let's start there 

Bonnie: then.

Understanding and then images. Okay. 

Robyn: Okay. 

Bonnie: Remembering your dreams. 

so the first thing to do is just get a dream notebook and have the intention of remembering and writing your dreams and make it a notebook you really like, because then it's fun. Like sometimes when you buy a journal and you're like, oh, it's so pretty and I can't wait to open it.

 That creates more energy and intention. So that's the first way. And write down whatever comes up. This is the thing. I have a very broad definition of [00:23:00] dreaming. A lot of people say, I didn't dream because they're expecting some kind of Spielberg movie that has plot a narrative. But if you have a feeling or a snippet of a song or just one sentence or one image, write it down.

That's a dream. So the more you do that, the more you start to write them down, the more elaborate your dreaming will be, and then it'll also settle into being just simple, clear little bits. So then the question is, all of those images, are those images, symbols, or images? They're images. Symbols are something that someone tells me.

That's what that means. They come from the outside, they're fixed. Images are my own. understandings of things, using things that I already know and understand. For example, I know what that guy's backyard looks like and I understand what backyard in the back of [00:24:00] somebody means. And I also know that it doesn't have that overhang, so that added addition to that waking time thing.

Gave me a chance to understand I'm under an overhang, which brings me to Karen's question. How do you start to make sense of it? Sometimes just saying those things out loud and this, I do recommend to people, write your dream in the morning. Let it go. When you come back in the evening, you've put some distance between it, read it out loud.

Just hearing yourself read these things. There's a little plant under an overhang, I'm already starting to understand. What this dream is about. they're more simple than we think. 

Robyn: I love the way that you're putting this for people. 'cause you can see how this, if practice can transform your life and it's something we all have the ability to do, There's just no question, love you also classify dreams. In different types, and we don't have to go through all of them, but can you give an example [00:25:00] of how you classify them and what a category might be? 

Bonnie: Yeah, so that really comes from my dream teacher's work and she classifies dreams and looks at dreams as seven kinds that really fall into two different categories.

So they're either unresolved or resolved. So unresolved is there's a tiny little plant under an overhang. It's unresolved because it shouldn't be there, it's not getting sun, it's pretty easy to understand that moving, it resolves it. So most dreams, four of the seven are unresolved and they're asking us to interact in, bring them to resolution.

 Other dreams, great dreams of light, dreams of union. Those are resolved and those are the dreams that people, there's a big experience. There's either like a message or an inner knowing or some kind of super expansive, maybe even spiritual experience in those kinds of dreams. And they're [00:26:00] resolved, which is also in and of itself a teaching.

Like the more we do the little things of in my dream, removing the little plant and planting it in the sun, the more we clean up space in ourself to have those big dreams and to have a much bigger, expansive experience. 

Robyn: And then how do you say that you bridge the science with the dream work in this practice and in the book.

Bonnie: So this dreaming work is actually goes all the way back to the 13th century. And in the 13th century, people were much more embodied. They understood embodiment. They didn't even have a word for embodiment because they were just in their bodies. Nowadays we've become mental. We separate mind and body. We separate mind, body, spirit.

We make all these separations. So we have to think, how do I get back in my body? How [00:27:00] do I reconnect myself? We don't have the same kind of natural sense of how things move until we learn it again. So our bodies, dreaming, comes from our bodies, not our brains. And what science does is it describes something, and we can look at neuroscience and we can add language and see that, okay, yes, when someone is dreaming, this is the part of the brain that's active and that sort of thing. But what this ancient lineage understands is a very holistic understanding of how the mind, body, spirit works together as a whole unit.

And so I use science because. it's fascinating, and B, it's the vocabulary of today, and so it's helpful to people. But it's like a kaleidoscope. There's a little piece of science that works over here, a little piece that understands [00:28:00] something over there but the ancient understanding is total.

Robyn: Oh, you're speaking our language. we, so 

Karen: I truly never thought of that. First of all, I never thought, I would've thought that the dream came from the brain. Not the body start there, but the idea that the dream can. Really connect the dots between your mind, body, and spirit. that's a first for me.

I've never thought of a methodology like dreaming, being able to do that. So that's fascinating. 

Bonnie: Here's the thing. Everybody dreams, animals. Dream dreaming is a universal language, and it's. A long language and you go back in human history and people have been gathering around campfires, sharing their dreams.

There's all kinds of documentation of groups of people having not only shared dreams, but also hug. Brody has written a beautiful book called Maps and Dreams about his work with, a certain group of people in the Canadian [00:29:00] Northwest who put knowledge in the dream world and when asked about something, they say, we'll let you know tomorrow and have a little dream.

And they go in and they all have the same dream. So they keep territorial maps. In the dream world, we talk about the cloud today. That's their cloud, the dream world. So dreams for me, as I view it, is nature's. Gift for our own inner development, our own connectedness. And it is a beautiful gift that all of us have.

Robyn: And I feel like I'm so glad we are talking about it. I'm so glad you continue to study and teach people how to use them, because I don't feel like we talk about it enough in our every day. To me, if we could teach our children how to better understand their dreams, think about how they could grow more into themselves maybe in a more fulfilled [00:30:00] way sooner if we embrace that as their parents, right?

Or teachers. 

Bonnie: We have a program for young Dreamers at the institute. 

Robyn: I, yes. 

Bonnie: I love it because, we all do start out as dreamers and I was so fortunate to have a family that talked about it with me and shared their own dreaming stories. And actually that's one of the little homeworks that we give our young dreamers is go and ask your.

Parent or caregiver to tell you if they've ever had a dream that they knew an answer or changed their life. Everyone comes back with one, and then parents wanna take classes at the institute because they're like, why have I not been talking about this with my kid? Then they find, oh, this is. Something that brings our family together, because my kids really like to talk about that.

 And children are very much in that dream world. 

 they will say random things to you, which are not random at all. They'll say yeah, today was really scary. There was a tiger in the classroom. Okay, so what was the tiger and what was it doing? And then you'll find out it was a [00:31:00] something.

There was some kind of incident. There was some kind of, it's not random. It's how they're expressing it and seeing it as a dream. 

Robyn: I love that. Feel like it's something that really should be taught more to embrace, because to your point, they are much more in the dream world, in the waking dream, all of it much closer to it because they're not as distracted, most of them as we are, or in quotes, busy as we are.

And I think so many of us who may be parents.

Can think of our children wanting to share that, and how do you really cultivate that in order for them to then utilize that in creating the life that they are really meant to live.

Bonnie: Yeah. We had one young girl who was having just normal dreams and we talk about dreams and make activities with dreams and plays and things like this, and so she had a dream that, she ran outside her house was on fire, and then she had thought in her [00:32:00] dream, oh, but they taught me that I can change things. And so she went back in, got all of her family and the dog back out, and she woke up and she was like, that was easy. 

Robyn: That's so awesome. 

Bonnie: Later, she became a high diver. That was the thing she did in high school fearless kid.

And I think learning that sort of agency is really important for kids to learn. 

Robyn: I 

Karen: see 

Robyn: that. 

Karen: How much time do we spend asleep? Where that is like time that we can actually utilize and learn from versus just go to sleep, wake up, and as like Robin said, just move forward. it can be like a co collaborator with us.

Robyn: Yes, 

Bonnie: totally. 

Karen: Versus just I feel like wasted and lost, which I feel so much of us do because we don't pay attention.

Robyn: You dismiss it almost. 

Bonnie: Yeah. 

Robyn: Yeah. Yeah. 

Bonnie: It's not lost. It's not wasted. Things are happening in there. They are, 

But we can use it more fully to start paying attention to it.

Robyn: Let's talk about what you call the great dream of [00:33:00] self. What does that mean and how can our dreams guide us towards that? 

Bonnie: So we actually touched on that a little bit in that inside of us we have. So many potentials and we are meant to unfold those potentials, and yet we very frequently block ourselves from that.

 Even just and this is a little, exercise that's an interesting one for all your listeners who are just going to start, writing their dreams, just notice what parts of yourself you want to edit or judge or criticize or say, Ooh, I can't believe I dream that's so embarrassing. Or whatever the sort of self-talk is just by yourself, with yourself writing your dreams down in the morning.

 Those things are the things that. Cause us to hold our uniqueness back. We are all unique and it's really important for us to express that [00:34:00] uniqueness. When we don't, we create inner conflicts and those inner conflicts create outer conflicts. When we're holding ourself back because we think we're, under the overhang of the much more brilliant business partner, that is where we create conflicts.

There's a conflict in ourself because there's a part of ourself that says, yeah, but you also have some ideas. And then the partner's feeling something like, it's weird. There's a weird shadow there. And. I wanted to partner in business with this person for a reason. So the more we unlock our own potential, the more we begin to realize our own great dream of who we are and what we're meant to be doing in life.

Robyn: So for those who wanna start remembering their dreams if they don't, what would you suggest they start doing? Today 

Bonnie: really get the Dream journal. That is the best thing to do. Get the journal, start writing your dreams down. You can put on the first blank page tonight. I'll have a clear dream.

[00:35:00] And remember, put your pen there and be sure and write it down before you jump up. And yes, paper and pen is so much better than phones. Everybody wants to use the phone, but grabbing the phone and turning it on, getting the app on, it already takes us out of that dreaming space.

I've 

Robyn: tried this before, but after reading your book and talking to you today, I'm. Really committing to it. I'm actually gonna , get one for my whole family, make sure they have a dream journal next to their side of the bed.

That's great. In your book you also talk about a life plan., 

Karen: let's talk about that a how do we connect the dots into purpose in our lives and distill from these very imagery laden stories that we're telling ourselves? How do we really translate that into our.

Day-to-day life. 

Bonnie: Yeah, so the life plan is a staple of this. Ancient tradition and gives a map of how our energies move in our body. And it's a very simple map that [00:36:00] just shows that when we are balanced when we're in homeostasis, we are. At our own natural rhythms with our primary instincts, our breathing, our eating, our sleeping.

 And then it shows as a map what happens when we get off balance there and then how to return. And what I do in the book is then show you how that corresponds the different parts of the life plan to the dreams we have. So you asked earlier about the kinds of dreams. We'll just talk for a moment about really the most.

Frequent dream, which is a nightmare. 

Everybody has nightmares. And we also can pretty easily make the correspondence to our waking time because we say certain things like, oh my gosh, my boss is such a nightmare.

 What we're talking about is some kind of restriction of emotion, some kind of conflict that's happening there. For me, nightmares are a friend because they're showing us in a [00:37:00] very, sharp and acute way to wake us up to some kind of emotional reaction that I'm having. 

 So I can shift out of that nightmare and I can move the anger or fear that I'm feeling and redirect that energy to a great dream and resolve.

 This intensity of emotion that I'm having, which is not about stuffing it. So anybody who starts reading that is gonna understand, it's truly about shifting it, and images help us to do that. Dreams wake us up to where we are on that. And then images help us to shift it. 

Robyn: that's really cool.

Bonnie: It's so simple. And again the same thing as moving the plant from under the overhang. There's some kind of restriction and then there's expansion. And when we're expanded, we're more creative. We're flowing, we're allowing ourself to come forward. 

Karen: One of the questions on the list that I just love so much is about [00:38:00] dreams.

Are they just personal or do they have something to say now about the collective? Back to the study that you were talking about earlier about the people in Canada who had these collective dreams and talk about what you know about that 

Bonnie: So one thing I will say is we're all human, So whatever dream I have. It has something to say for all of us. So even as Karen was talking about the dream of the old dress or finding the right outfit, I had three or four dreams go through my mind that those feelings reminded me of, which is why I gave the dream that I did. Somehow I landed on that and it just reminded me of that.

 So understanding other people's dreams helps us to understand ourself. It's all part of the human experience. I also find when I've been dreaming with a group for some time, people start to dream around the same or similar themes and it becomes really dynamic and really beautiful. And not only [00:39:00] does it build community, but it does so because people are seeing like, wow, there's.

So much similarity in things that we're going through and begin to move around situations in their own lives by getting input from, oh, this person had this insight. I can use that insight in what I'm dealing with, and it becomes this really generative process. 

Robyn: Wow. Karen, you and I may have to be collectively dreaming.

Karen: I was just saying we should really share in the morning what we dream, 

Robyn: that should be a New practice. 

Bonnie: definitely. 

Robyn: I know we mentioned the word intuition. you talk about the intuiting self.

How can somebody start to validate or strengthen that part of themselves and really start to believe. That part. 

Bonnie: people ask me all the time, how do I trust myself? 

And it's because when we're kids, there's some adult well-meaning, but someone who dismisses our feelings. And so we learn to set those aside and [00:40:00] just sit in class and do what we have to do.

 So then when we get to be adults and we're told now, be intuitive in your work. Be an intuitive leader. Be an intuitive coach. We're like. What does that even mean and how do I know, how do I distinguish that? So one way is to record it. So everyone has intuitive moments. I gave the example of I need to call my friend and then, oh, my friend just called, write that down.

 Because the more we write that down and give. Some feeling to it. What did that feel like right before I felt like I needed to call my friend? Then it becomes a sort of verified thing so that over time, even within just a few weeks, we start to see, oh. Something shifts very specifically in me when.dot is going to happen.

 it's as known to us as, we all know we're about to sneeze. How do we know there's some little tingles. There's this starts happening. Same. 

Robyn: So good. [00:41:00] And I know we talked about the Institute for Dreaming and Imagery in regards to this program for children, but what else.

Do you do there and 

Bonnie: all these fun things? 

Robyn: Fun, yes. How fun. Please tell us

Bonnie: so we provide classes on imagery, classes on dreaming. We also work with organizations and companies that ask us to come in and do programs for leadership development or artistic development.

 So there's something for individuals, just anybody who wants to come and do things, and then organizations can contact us as well for custom programs. 

Robyn: And when you work with organizations, what does that typically look like? Is that coming in and working with an executive team?

Bonnie: So there's different ways that we do that. if they have a particular challenge, we have a lot of imagery exercises that help to, unblock that and put people back into the flow of creative process. We also have just setting up working with [00:42:00] dreams is also something really great, particularly in conjunction with individual coaching that we do with people.

 There's so many studies about dreaming and how it does move our creativity and in terms of leadership, leaders, especially these days, tend to think in a very linear manner and. Creating more flexibility in thinking and opening out the ways in which they think about things is something that makes for more fluid teams and idea flow, innovation and dreams.

Help facilitate that. 

Karen: I just love this, all of this ancient practice that , many of us have forgotten all coming back to really help people reconnect with themselves. And this is fun too, Bonnie. What I love,

this is just something that you can really have fun with as you said. And just play with it a little bit every day and see what messages come. Come forth and build on those over time. 

Bonnie: It's super playful and I [00:43:00] have so frequently these, senior executives who I'm on a Zoom, it's just me and them, and they'll lean in and lower their voice and they'll say.

 I had a dream that I made a big decision from it's gotta be a secret. Wow. 

And I'm like, great. Tell me about it. and so part of it is also validating people's own inner knowing. 

Robyn: Definitely. 

Bonnie: Tap into that. We have it all of us. 

Robyn: I feel like it's this secret language that we don't talk about and what you are doing and everybody that's working with you is helping us to understand it, and each one of us.

Has a different language in a way, but there are these universal parts of it that we can understand so that we can then apply it to our language and to our dreams. And I love how you've even talked about today, the waking dream and so forth, because as you said, we're always in that state.

 We can always access it. It's at our core, it's part of our soul. It's all of it. [00:44:00] And for this lifetime. It can really help us navigate in such an easier way and then helping us have a little more control of where we go next.

Because you, as you've said. we can change things. 

Bonnie: We can totally change things. And it also gives us really, I come back to that word agency. To know our inside and speak from that place instead of something we've Googled or some, something and Seminar told us to think and say.

Karen: It's like you have this, like you said, this secret partner that's always there to help guide you. And it's what Robin and I talk about all the time and how we, are always trying to learn ourselves through these different modalities.

And a dream is something, we all have, it's free, In life. you don't even have to get the book right to understand what it is. and the more we can enjoy that as a way of navigating and looking at it like a fun little puzzle we can solve in the morning over coffee, 

Robyn: but that really can end up transforming your [00:45:00] entire life. That's the thing about it, it's the power in it. it's playful and so powerful because you really can start to understand yourself and all these gifts that you have and are 

And then take action on it.

but it can be small steps. It's that small steps and understanding and trusting. 

Bonnie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Robyn: Thank you so much, Bonnie. 

Bonnie: Thank y'all. Really, thank you so much for letting me come and talk to you. 

Robyn: Oh my goodness. Thank you for all the work that you're doing and for following that passion that started when you were three years old.

Bonnie: Yeah. Think back to moments in your life, something that's been super interesting that's moved you and see, I bet it's played out a little 

Robyn: bit in your 

Bonnie: life to now 

Robyn: a thousand percent. I know that I'm doing this because of something that also happened to me when I was younger and following that passion.

Bonnie: Yeah. 

Robyn: So thank you for more about Bonnie and her book and her [00:46:00] offerings, you can visit bonnie buckner.com. That's B-O-N-N-I-E-B-U-C-K-N-E r.com. And everybody should go check out her book, the Secret Mind, which you can also find on bonnie Thank you. 

Bonnie: Thank you. 

Thank you so much.