Dreams as Medicine: Inside ‘The Secret Mind’ with Bonnie Buckner PhD
This is Wendy Halley, and you're listening to Lucid Cafe. Hey. Thanks for joining me. In today's episode, we're taking a deep dive into the helpful messages hidden in our dreams and how we can decode them. My guest, Bonnie Buckner, is a DreamWorks expert who's been teaching dreaming and imagery to individuals and organizations around the world for over twenty years.
Wendy:In her new book, The Secret Mind, and in this conversation, we discuss how paying attention to our dreams can help us develop, balance, and maintain harmony in our lives. Bonnie also shares the seven types of dreams we can have, as well as practical tips for dream recall and interpretation, which is where many of us get stuck. So Bonnie has a PhD in psychology and is a senior fellow at George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership. And she serves as program lead for their One Humanity Leadership Coaching Program, where she brings the institute's dream work to leadership development. She also co hosts the one humanity labs podcast.
Wendy:So please enjoy my fun conversation with Bonnie Buckner. Bonnie, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm excited to talk to you.
Bonnie:Thank you for having me on the show. I'm super excited to talk to you.
Wendy:Okay. So now that we're both very excited, let's see where we can go with this conversation. Perfect. You have recently released a book. It's called The Secret Mind, Unlock The Power Of Dreams To Transform Your Life.
Wendy:I think that paying attention to our dreams is vital, and it's a lost kind of art. So you have written a book that makes it very inviting to want to explore dreaming because of your take on dreams. So I would love to hear just in just a broad stroke what the secret mind is to you.
Bonnie:So I'm super glad that this makes it inviting for people to dream again because it's our birthright, really. Dreaming is a natural part of our body's ability to develop ourselves, to come to balance and maintain balance in ourselves and the relationships around us, both in human and nonhuman. And as humans, we used to going back in history, we used to dream together all the time. And dreaming is also a way of building community because it's a way of communicating from our depths and communicating in a way that is not constrained by pattern and social constructs and pressures and things like this that hold us back from speaking truthfully from our our inner self. So I'm excited that this makes it inviting to dream.
Bonnie:The secret mind for me is the fact that we're dreaming all the time. And I talk about that in two different ways in the book. One of the ways I talk about that is from just a very basic neurological level. So I look at and this is broad strokes to keep it simple, but there's two sort of primary cognitive processing systems in our brain. One is the executive network, and that's the one that everybody thinks of when they think of thinking.
Bonnie:It's the one that adds up numbers, does a to do list that's talking to you right now, and is the logical, rational things are causal, they add up part of our thinking. We have another aspect of cognition, another way of thinking that is image based, and it's called the default network. And here, default meaning it's our baseline. It's where we go to. And it's that same network that lights up and gets incredibly intensely active when we're asleep and we're dreaming.
Bonnie:It also activates when we just stop having goal directed thinking. Go back to school when you used to gaze out the window, mind wander, daydream. Even today as adults, I have so many people telling me I was taking a shower, and suddenly I realized what I needed to write about or how I needed to answer that email. That's the default network at play. And it's always available to us.
Bonnie:We don't spend enough time over there, and I'll come back to that later. But it's also the part of us when we dream, and we're problem solving in our dream. So that's one way that I talk about it. The second way I talk about the secret mind is our ability to be present to that and to see that everything from our inside, the old ancient rule of reciprocity, what's on the inside is on the outside, as above, so below. If I have conflict on my inside, I am creating conflict on the outside.
Bonnie:If there's conflict in my life on the outside, I need to look inside and start there to resolve it because I'm an active participant in the creation of that, which means I'm dreaming myself into being at all moments. I'm dreaming the world that I'm living. I'm dreaming myself into being. And when we make that connection and we put our attention to it, then we can change what we're dreaming. And that's the power of transforming using the secret mind.
Wendy:I love it. It's also very shamanic, what you just described. Yeah. That we're dreaming ourselves into existence. We're dreaming our experiences into existence.
Wendy:Let's let's get back to that in a bit. But but before we dive into kind of the content of your book, I'd love to hear a little bit about how you ended up on this path. Like, what was it about dreaming that got your attention?
Bonnie:Yeah. So when I was three years old, I had a series of nightmares. And I was sitting on our front steps in the morning sun, and I was thinking, I can't do this anymore. It's real awful. And as a little three year old mind, I started thinking, can I just never go to sleep again?
Bonnie:How am I gonna do that? How am gonna keep myself awake? And then I was going through this sort of list of ideas, and then it just really hit me. Oh, this is what I'm on this planet to do. I need to learn to master my nightmares and then go and teach that to other people.
Bonnie:Now as a three year old, that was very clear to me.
Wendy:And That let me just say, that's crazy that you had that depth of insight and understanding at that age. Maybe. But when I read that in your book, I was like, I need to ask about this.
Bonnie:Maybe it's crazy, but maybe it's not. I have a lot of adults tell me, oh, yeah. I knew when I was a kid that this is the thing that I was here to do or what I wanted to do. Here to do, want to do Mhmm. Sometimes people intertwine those when we're adults, but those initial insights and passions as kids are generally our big seeds.
Wendy:Right. At three, though, that seems like crazy young to understand that. I always imagine that being a little bit, like like, maybe a few years older when you have more cognitive capacity to have that level of insight, but I was, like, crazy impressed that or maybe we all have it and we don't remember.
Bonnie:Think it's more that. Yeah. Because at the institute I run, we have a children's program. We work with young dreamers. We don't work with dreamers at that age.
Bonnie:We start with age eight. But the wisdom and understanding that young people have is incredible. What then happens is an adult, a mentor, teacher starts to poo those ideas and tamp them down. And that's a key thing to my story because I was very open with talking about dreams to my family. And in particular, my father and his mother, my grandmother, are huge dreamers, and they have stories of dreams changing their life.
Bonnie:And a big story in our family was my grandmother and a dreaming experience that saved my uncle Charles' life in the war. They handled that information in a wide open expansive way and talked to me about dreams. My dad would teach me imagery exercises of how to go inside and connect with that secret mind. He didn't call it that, but he was constantly giving me ways of keeping that connection going and listening to my dreams. And that's so important.
Bonnie:If there's any parent or teacher listening to us right now, just listen to what your kids are saying to you and take it for what it is. And they may shift out of it and whatever, but the more open we can be, the better.
Wendy:Absolutely. Yeah. No. It is really sad that we do that. And, unfortunately, I think it is the norm that the the shutting of that part of our lives happens so readily.
Bonnie:I've been thinking a lot lately. We're gonna go off road a little bit from the here. Okay. We're so frightened in the modern age of experiences that are not readily visible or explainable, and that has not been the case for most of humanity's experience. That has been the case only since this enlightenment when everything became separating body and mind and beginning to categorize all things in nature and categorize all experiences and put little boxes around everything.
Bonnie:And we've taken that to really maybe the end point right now that everything is statistically measured. But talk to any modern day doctor, and they will recount for you incredible stories of things that couldn't have happened, weren't supposed to happen. I'm doing air quotes here. Miracles of people who statistically weren't supposed to keep living and have lived and lived. Before this need to verify, need to make things causal modern time that we live in, people were two things happening.
Bonnie:One, they were more open to other experiences. There was not this chopping into small bits and pieces of our perceptions and experiences. The other thing is they were way more embodied and in relationship with nature. Anybody who spends an enormous amount of time in nature, and I highly recommend that I do, and it's essential for dreaming. It's essential for shamanism.
Bonnie:It's part of our job on this planet, I believe. Anyone who does that, you're going to have experiences of awe and wonder and things that defy definition because nature defies definition. I do touch on this a little bit in the book because one of the things I talk about is our need today to allow possibility that defies definition. We are facing so many problems. And if we keep things in little boxes, we won't solve them.
Bonnie:If we allow ourselves to go to a place of imagination, we can.
Wendy:It's like you're in my head, Bonnie. I no. All of this stuff you're talking about has been I got I'm, like, devising a talk, and I'm gonna be calling it entering the age of possibility. And part of that talk is gonna be revolving around the cultural worldview that we all hold and and how much it influences our lives in ways that we don't really understand, just like the power of belief and thought. And just because they're beliefs and thoughts doesn't mean that they are an accurate representation of who we are and how the world works.
Wendy:Exactly. We look at them as gospel. And what you're saying is let's blow the doors off of those and get back to our true nature, which is nature. We are nature. But that's part of the cultural worldview.
Wendy:In my opinion, is that we see ourselves as separate from nature somehow better or more it I don't know. Just that we see ourselves as better.
Bonnie:Yeah. With categories comes hierarchies.
Wendy:Yep. And the all those boxes you mentioned. We're really good at at putting things in boxes.
Bonnie:We are. And I say dismantle them.
Wendy:Yeah. I mean, there's a place for some boxing, but I don't know if everything needs to
Bonnie:Definitely.
Wendy:Yeah. We're at I mean, maybe slightly out of balance. Slightly. Maybe a little bit.
Bonnie:Maybe a lot of bit.
Wendy:It's really heartening to hear you talk about these things that have been going through my head in a pretty strong way in the last few months in particular. So that's really cool. And dreams are the gateway.
Bonnie:Dreams are exactly the gateway. And if you think about some of the boxes that have been dismantled recently, quantum physics being one of them, and the theory of relativity came from what? A dream. So dreaming opens us out. I could list tons of scientific inventions that came from dreams.
Bonnie:From everything from the shape of the benzene ring to insulin as a cure for diabetes. The sewing machine came from a dream about cannibals. And it's that nonlinear yeah. You want do you know that story?
Wendy:Oh.
Bonnie:Oh, it's awesome.
Wendy:I'd love to hear that story.
Bonnie:Elias Howe was trying to invent the sewing machine and was not having any luck at all. And then he has this dream that he's being carried off by cannibals who are carrying spears. And as he's being carried off, presumably to his end, he sees that there is a hole in the tip of their spear. And he wakes up and he realized he had been putting the hole in the needle on the non sharp end. And when he moved it to the sharp end, like the spear in the dream, it worked.
Bonnie:That's what clicked and made the invention of the sewing machine.
Wendy:I love it. That's awesome.
Bonnie:Isn't it?
Wendy:Yeah. And it's so, I mean, also that he was able to I mean, I it sounds like his brain was already trying to problem solve that anyway. So he was able to interpret that very abstract sounding set of symbols.
Bonnie:And that's the key thing. He lived at a time when people were not as far from dreaming as they are today, and people were more likely to think curiously about their dreams and to spend a little time playing with those ideas and the images that came up. So I teach a lot of creativity classes. And one of the very, very key things to do is to write your dreams down and sit with them. Lay in bed.
Bonnie:Spend fifteen minutes laying in bed and letting those images roll around before grabbing your phone and jumping up to make coffee and the things we start doing because it takes you to that executive network. It throws you out of that imaginary future thinking space.
Wendy:Suggestion. Yeah. Yep. I know. It's all linked to time too.
Wendy:Right? It's like we're always beholden to our schedules and everything, so we don't give ourselves the luxury luxury of doing those kinds of things, unfortunately. But they're vital.
Bonnie:It's rich. Yeah. And so one of the things that I say to people is do whatever you can to take back time for yourself. It's yours. And we have a choice.
Bonnie:We can give it away to other people, or we can keep it for ourselves. And I'm not talking about spending three hours in bed every morning. I'm talking fifteen minutes laying there and just being curious about what comes up, taking a moment to reflect before grabbing the phone. It's not asking a lot.
Wendy:No. And that is where people usually cite having the best insight is Yeah. In that time if they do allow that to happen. Because even if you don't re and you can correct me if I'm wrong. Even if you don't recall any specific dreams from the night before, you're you still have access to the wisdom, that part of you, you're dreaming
Bonnie:self. And I expand the definition of dreaming. For me, dreams are any sensation you wake up with, a color, a snippet of a song, whatever's playing through your head, and write that down. And we have a guy I teach at a coaching program at George Washington University and have them doing dream practices. And we have a guy there who teaches at a different university, and he said, before we started doing this work, I didn't have a dream practice.
Bonnie:He goes, but I did always make myself stay in bed because for some reason, those first three to five minutes, I knew how I needed to go next for the problems that were in my mind. He goes, but I didn't remember a dream, but I just woke up knowing what to do next.
Wendy:Great example. Yes. It's yeah. And like you're saying, it it doesn't require a lot of time or years of meditation practice or it's just it's innate. It's
Bonnie:It's part of us. It's our inner language. And that language of imagery is precognitive, preverbal. So there are two languages that we are born with. One is a language of music and the other is this language of images.
Bonnie:Verbal language comes later. And that's really key because music and imagery are languages of experience, and imagery is what composes dreams. So young children, before they begin to verbally describe their world, they simply experience their world. When you and I go outside, we say, oh, look at that pretty blue sky. However, a child is fully immersed in experience of something.
Bonnie:You see the difference? There's a tiny distancing between experience and describing saying of experience.
Wendy:I love it. And you're reminding me that so my practice of shamanism is based in Polynesian Hawaiian shamanism. Interesting. And they suggest that we don't have and I've talked about this before in the podcast, so I apologize to
Bonnie:people who
Wendy:might have heard this before. That they suggest that we don't have one soul, but we have three. And we have a higher self. Mhmm. We have a body soul.
Wendy:Mhmm. And that is basically the dreaming of our bodies. Just to to summarize it, the part of us that perceives, and that's the part of us that's really active when we're born up until we're about age six or seven when we start growing the third soul, which is called the mental soul. And then we start developing beliefs and thoughts in a really cogent way, all those boxes you're referencing.
Bonnie:Mhmm.
Wendy:And so the they're supposed to work together as a team, all three aspects, but they're very independent if they're not. They're inherently independent. They all have they each have their own motivations. But if for that little child, they're all it's that body soul is unconscious. It's all just perceiving and taking in information, and it's that You're
Bonnie:responding, I would imagine.
Wendy:Exactly. It's and it's the experiencer. Cognition kicks in later, the mental soul, then that part of us starts to interpret it and wants to understand it and make sense of it and analyze it and then reanalyze it and blah blah blah. But I think that's that's where I see the imbalance is through the body and the mental souls is that we are a very head centric culture. We're just living in our heads, and then our bodies are are getting loud with emotions that are being ignored
Bonnie:Yes.
Wendy:And perceptions that are trying to come through. But the information is right there all the time. It's But if there's a lot of internal noise, you can't perceive it. And that's why those moments in the early part, like when you wake up, are precious because that noise is probably at its quietest, and you're most coherent or most able to access those perceptions.
Bonnie:Yeah. And let's go back. Can I riff on that just a little bit?
Wendy:Yeah. Please.
Bonnie:Let's talk about the static. It's an interesting thing. All of us know the decision that's right for us. We do know that. However, most people think themselves out of it.
Bonnie:A really easy example is the idea if I were to say to you, I'm gonna come stay at your house. You would know inside yourself. Okay. For Bonnie, it's two days is a good amount of time. I've got a lot of work going on right now.
Bonnie:Okay? You know that. But then let's go with this example. A lot of people would then say, oh, but then that makes me a bad friend if I say only two days, and I can just move my schedule around. It's okay if I work a little extra and I don't sleep as much.
Bonnie:I'll just do my work at night, and then conflict occurs. So many people come to me to do work on making decisions in their life, and dreaming helps us to return to that inner knowing because dreaming is coming from that inner knowing place. It truly is the language of experience and response because we go so fast. Right? All day long, we've got a million things to do.
Bonnie:We're thinking. But while all that's going on, we're having inner responses to it. Those responses do include the emotional static we're talking about, as well as inner knowing, as well as just how we're understanding things, as well as new ideas around these things. If we're not taking time to tune into that, as you said so beautifully, the unattended to emotions start to become super loud, then we're no longer hearing those insights, oh, this is what I can do with this, or this is what I understand about this. They're overcrowded by these undealt with emotions.
Bonnie:So dreaming also puts us right in front of those so we can untangle our energies from it.
Wendy:Yes. I love that. Yes. It makes perfect sense. And, yeah, that quiet inner knowing would be sourced from the higher self, from the perspective that I've experienced and been had been taught.
Wendy:Constantly feeding you wisdom and experience to have. It's the it's dreaming us into existence from this tradition. And if it's if it's so noisy, emotionally and mental and mentally noisy in your interior world, you can't hear those whispers of knowing or intuitions, or it can make it hard for you to remember your dreams, I think. And yeah. So it's it's it's what you're describing to me is just like disharmony.
Wendy:Like, we have we're carrying a lot of disharmony, but it's we're so used to it that we don't realize we're in disharmony.
Bonnie:Yeah. It's like boiling a frog. Have you heard that expression?
Wendy:Yeah. I have. Yeah.
Bonnie:That's a really key point because we may habituate to anger, let's say. Mhmm. But then if I have a dream about it, that dream is going to get my attention. So an example in the book, the woman who dreams that she goes into a big stadium with a flamethrower and just blasts everybody and raises the whole stadium. She's horrified by this dream Lisa.
Bonnie:And horrified by just the intensity of it.
Wendy:But it's rich.
Bonnie:Yeah. And it's a nightmare. And a lot of people are like, I don't wanna have nightmares. But here's the thing. Nightmares are our friend.
Bonnie:Because as we started to work with this dream, this woman realized, I'm actually angry all the time. And I'm angry about a lot of things. I just didn't know how much I was putting that on other people. Putting it on other people is the blasting out of the flamethrower. Doesn't take a PhD to understand this dream.
Bonnie:It's a very
Wendy:It's pretty direct. Yeah.
Bonnie:Simple, and this is how our dreams work. They show us simply through image and by somehow provoking an emotion in some way. And the emotion in this dream, this person was, like, horrified. They couldn't believe the intensity, and they also felt the intensity of blasting the flamethrower and not being able to stop. And probably had, at the same time there was horror, was also feeling, like that relief of blasting it out.
Bonnie:But then there's the horror, which overrides it. So we get to see all aspects of ourself. It's like looking in a mirror every night. Where am I? What am I doing?
Bonnie:And this person, we can work with our dreams to shift. So in this instance, there was not a waking dream exercise. This person understood it and simply went out into their day to day and shifted it. So there's also a lot of exercises in the book about how to transform the energy of an emotion to an emotion of feeling, which is a more expanded state. And this person worked with himself in that way.
Bonnie:But in some instances and in many dreams, unresolved dreams, we can do a waking dream exercise and close our eyes and return to the dream, the sensations of the dream, and address the necessity of that dream to shift it. So another example is a nightmare of someone who's squeezed in with tons of people into this little car with the music turned up super, super loud. They're going way too fast. The road is way too dark, and they know they're about to fall into a gaping hole. Also a nightmare.
Bonnie:And it's a nightmare of too much. Too many people in the car, too dark, too loud music. So this person recognized that in their life, there was too much. They were on an extended business trip. It was just too many dinners out, too many clients, too much.
Bonnie:Their body is literally telling them, I'm gonna crash. I'm gonna fall into a gaping hole. And so you can see in this example how easy it is to not pay attention to those signs because I, air quotes again, I gotta do this job. Yep. But in fact, the body is not gonna be able to do that job if it continues.
Bonnie:So the waking dream exercise was simply close your eyes, go back into the stream, get in the driver's seat, and step on the brake. As soon as the person did that, the scene shifted completely. The sun was out. No one was in the car. It's quiet, peaceful.
Bonnie:And the key here is not having a script. I did not say step on the break and then see the sun. I just said step on the break. The spontaneous inner self will spontaneously shift. And with that shift, that person really felt the difference.
Bonnie:The much. Now suddenly, the peace and the sun. And because that was so dramatically different, they could take that decision. I don't wanna crash. And they called the office and said, I gotta take a break.
Wendy:It's a really good example. And this would probably be a good time to if you could maybe touch on the seven types of dreams and maybe a general overview of why it's important, like how it can help us to pay attention to dreams just in general.
Bonnie:Yeah. So in the lineage I teach, which comes from the thirteenth century and it's an ancient lineage, there are seven kinds of dreams. And four of those dreams are unresolved, meaning, like, the car crash or the flamethrower. There's something that is out of balance and signaling out of balance. And three of those dreams are resolved, and they're great dreams, light dreams of union, those big experiences or big message.
Bonnie:So the idea is that the dreams themselves are the mirror to our inner experiencing. And whatever I'm dreaming in the day, I mean, in the night and living in the day, and whatever I'm living in the day, I'm dreaming at night. So if I'm having an unresolved dream, my energies are out of balance, and there's some kind of conflict because of that in my daily experience. If I'm dreaming a resolved dream, things are in balance and harmony, and I'm open to having that kind of experience. And these also correspond to daily experiences.
Bonnie:If I'm get an email and it I'm that makes me so mad. Right? I have a tangle of energy, and it clenches my heart in some way and squeezes my stomach. And if I deal with it, then I can open myself to a different experience. If I don't, I'm gonna dream something squeezed or intense.
Bonnie:So if I have a different kind of day, I'm I'm I'm lucky enough at this moment to be looking out over Chesapeake Bay. I'm traveling for work right now, and there's a beautiful view. And this morning, I was just looking at it. Was so peaceful, and everything was so expanded. That's a great dream.
Bonnie:So our dreaming corresponds to the place, the mental mindset that we choose to put ourselves in our day to day experience. And there's this sort of hinge dream, the fourth kind of dream, which is a clear dream. It's unresolved. But in a clear dream, it's showing us the block, how to get over the block, but also these latent potentials that we have. All of us have potentials that we generally tuck away or hide under the desk, and the dreams help us to see that.
Bonnie:These clear dreams show us that right now, I'm in this in between point. I can go to block, or I can activate this latent potential, get over that block, and move my life somewhere else.
Wendy:Everything you're describing just points to how innately creative we are if we point our focus in this direction. And that there's a part of us that's longing to to do this.
Bonnie:Yeah. Desperately.
Wendy:And it's right there all the time, and it's just it it is sad that we've gotten so far away from this tendency to do that.
Bonnie:It's okay. It's right there. And here's what's so interesting. Our bodies are innately wise and here to help us, and we can think of that in very scientific terms. It's called homeostasis.
Bonnie:If I'm too hot, I sweat. If I'm too cold, I shiver. If I don't have enough nutrition, I'm hungry. Our body is constantly signaling us. It's not just at the physical level.
Bonnie:If I have an emotional imbalance, then I'm creating a physical imbalance and creating a mental imbalance and a spiritual imbalance all in one. Dreams are part of that homeostasis of those aspects of ourselves to help us to heal ourselves and keep ourselves in balance. It's maintenance and healing all in one.
Wendy:Well said. Thanks. So one of the you've got lots of great tips in the book to help people navigate the dream territory. Can we talk a little bit about how people might get tripped up around interpretation?
Bonnie:Yeah. First of all, let's start with the very easy thing, which is getting people to write their dreams down.
Wendy:Okay.
Bonnie:And that's really important because the more that becomes a practice, understand how one is dreaming. So we begin to understand our own very subjective, very particular dreaming language. What happens frequently is someone's not really dreaming, doesn't have a practice, Suddenly, have a very emotional or intense or particularly vibrant dream, and they run to Google or a dream dictionary and try and find the symbology of it.
Wendy:Yes. They do.
Bonnie:This throws us immediately outside of ourself and gets us to thinking about things in a mental way and a one size fits all. Those don't work. You are the one dreaming. You are the one having a subjective experience called life. You are the one making sense of that experience called life.
Bonnie:You are the one who has the imagery that draws from that experience to talk to you about that experience and teach you about that experience. So the more we spend time to just listen to ourself, the more we learn how our own language works. And I can give you an example of that. I was, many years ago, given a the advice from a naturopath to take colloidal silver. K?
Bonnie:So I took it a couple of days, and then I have this dream that there are these weird blue beings with weird blue goggles, and they're moving in this strange erratic way that's has no rhythm to it at all. And everything's in this weird blue cast. And I know in the dream, this isn't me. And I don't dream this way. And so I wake up, and I'm laying there thinking there's a foreign object in my body.
Bonnie:And I don't know what it is, but it's not harmonizing with my body chemistry. So I'm thinking, what am I doing? What did I introduce? Because you can have a particularly spicy meal and have a strange dream. But there was something very particular about these little beings.
Bonnie:It I just knew it was like molecules. Like, there's something in me. And then I was like, oh, I just introduced a new element, colloidal silver. That's not for me. So I stop it.
Bonnie:But then because I'm curious, I'm like, I wonder, are there any side effects? And there are.
Wendy:I was just gonna ask. Did you find out about the blue part?
Bonnie:Yes. And I had no idea. So, apparently, it's very rare, but some people turn blue when they take colloidal silver. Mhmm. So our bodies tell us, and they tell us in a language that we get.
Bonnie:But we have to have a practice of dreaming to know what that language is.
Wendy:And the word is practice. So it's a regular thing. It's not just paying attention to dream that you happen to have every six months or couple years or whatever. It's it is but it's right there. It's like it's free.
Wendy:It's there for us all the time. Trying I feel like I'm trying to sell people on, please.
Bonnie:And it returns us to a sense of agency. We spend so much of our days going out and finding other experts, But Yes. We are the expert of ourself.
Wendy:What a novel idea.
Bonnie:Yeah.
Wendy:But if I think what you're also there's a common denominator to this entire conversation to me, and I'll see what you think, is it's demonstrating a lack of trust, like our like a fracturing of our ability to trust in our innate wisdom and our innate abilities.
Bonnie:Yeah. But I understand that. We don't live in a world that has been supporting this. So in other cultures and other times when whole communities were dreaming together, there were supports around for that. And a lot of people people are afraid to dream because they don't know that they have the tools to shift whatever that dream experience is and deal with whatever that dream message is.
Bonnie:And I hope what my book, The Secret Mind, does for people is to show them the tools are really simple. Anybody can do it. And you can just reenter and address the needs of your inner self all by yourself, and it's very quick. That's the other amazing difference. We're not talking about a lot of talk time chewing things over.
Bonnie:It's just quick. All of the exercises I'm talking about are a minute or less.
Wendy:Which is the antithesis of what the experts are suggesting. Right? It's usually quite involved having to learn a practice from someone else. They have many steps, and it usually takes a long time. Whatever the expert is suggesting, it's usually not easy.
Wendy:But that makes me wonder if that's part of the lack of trust too is that we're giving our power over to experts, other people, and those people don't have answers for us. But we are giving them power as if they do, And then we try these things and have maybe limited or no success with it, and then that breaks the trust in general so that it's a sort of broad sweeping lack of trust in general. Like, we don't have it with ourselves, and we don't have it with each other. So I guess we're fucked.
Bonnie:No. We're not. Because it's very easy to return to our inner self, and it's not a thing to it's not about dwelling in it. It's very important for us to be active and to manifest things into in the world. When we have a dream, we're not meant to do nothing with it.
Bonnie:It's giving us a message. Hey. You're really angry or, hey. There's too much going on. You need to take a break.
Bonnie:And so we're meant to then wake up and do it. Or, hey. Here's a giant message of compassion and love. Do something with that. And I have a great example of that.
Bonnie:It just happened. I'm traveling all over The US teaching right now. And in between, I've been able to check-in on some old friends. And I was talking on the phone with a childhood friend, and we hadn't seen each other since before COVID. And we were arranging to see each other.
Bonnie:And she said, look, Buck, I just wanna let you know I'm not in a really great headspace right now. There's just a lot of crap going on in the world, and I'm just not great. I'm like, it's okay. I love you however you are. We hang up.
Bonnie:Two days later, she sends me a text. I had the best dream last night. I dreamed that we were on a we were back at summer camp, and we were on a truck ride. And I could literally feel our knees next to each other on the trailer dragging the grasses, and just that whole experience of pure joy.
Wendy:Sweet. Very sweet.
Bonnie:It shifted everything. So four days later is when I saw this friend of mine. Our whole time together was just joyful and fun, and we were having such a great time. And here's where I why I'm saying this story. She had an experience in a dream that shifted her out of the, I'm not in a great headspace.
Bonnie:But then she had to do the second step of dreaming, which is manifest that in her waking time. Not just let that be a dream, and she did. That's what's incredible about this story. She chose to be joyful, and it lasted four whole days till I got there, and it's still lasting. I'm still getting heart emoji messages and things like this.
Bonnie:Right? I what a great time. But this is what our dreams are trying to show us. There's very simple ways to make our life different.
Wendy:So it's like we're trying to get back to this more shamanic tradition where dreams are front and center. And and and it would not it doesn't have to look exactly how it did when shamanic traditions were commonplace. But what is your take or experience around looking at dreams through this more shamanic lens or however that has worked for you?
Bonnie:To be very specific, this thirteenth century lineage of dreaming that I teach is a Kabbalistic rooted tradition. Right. Yeah. Kabbalah means to receive. And the ancients asked the question, receive what and how?
Bonnie:And so it's it's a practice of revelation or the inner insight. And it's also a very practical practice because it's not enough to have these revelations or insight or deep spiritual experiences or however it comes to you. We have to then shift our world, And it goes part and parcel with this idea of healing the world, healing the self and healing the world and keeping things in balance. Now me personally, and I have two great teachers in my life, one of whom is rabbi Gershon Winkler, who talks a lot about the ancient Jewish tradition as being very shamanic in nature if we broaden out the definition of shamanism, which is really this idea of maintaining balance. The shaman is the sort of healer of maintaining balance in people and among people, and health is all about balance and also with the world in which we're living and sharing with others.
Bonnie:Yeah. Whether it's trees or this amazing red cardinal that's been hopping around in front of us as we've been talking today. Shamans understand that this world is image based. Right? We see things.
Bonnie:We call it and it's just a tree. That tree is a form, which is an image. It's telling us something. Everything about our existence here is about form and image. And so when we tap into that and shift those images and dreams are images and work with the inner images, we can transform things.
Wendy:Yes. I I I couldn't agree more, and this is another example of you being in my head. I was
Bonnie:I'm having fun in there. That's where I'm at. It's where I'm in a great town.
Wendy:I don't know. It's a strange place, my head. But this idea that that we're collectively dreaming this existence into existence, and that what if what would it be like if we each looked at our lives as a dream and that we're having, our waking experience? And so then you can start looking at the things that happen through a more symbolic lens rather than this more finite lens. And then it and then I think it can help transpose or transform how we are in relationship with the world.
Wendy:And that would and that and then we can and then I think from that point, maybe we can change the dream that we're collectively dreaming.
Bonnie:Well, we can, and we do it all time. We just don't know we're doing it. But if you look at media, that's a classic example of how we're dreaming collectively. We're creating images that are expressing what we're thinking, feeling, wanting, desiring on our inside. We throw it out there into media.
Bonnie:And those that sort of are have enough weight from enough people click with the zeitgeist, and we have a trend or we have a shift in culture. These are all examples of communal dreaming.
Wendy:I think that's why I love the word lucid so much. What I'm suggesting is what if we became lucid while we're awake, and therefore, we're more active participants in this dream. Yeah. We all know the way
Bonnie:go. To
Wendy:it. Yeah. Yeah.
Bonnie:To put it very simply, lucid dreaming is about waking up to an experience and being conscious to it and present to it. And one of the things that we do teach is doing that to in order to become lucid, clear, awake, present to waking time.
Wendy:Let me wrap up our conversation with a big question that my shamanic teacher, Hank, posed to all of us. Who is dreaming?
Bonnie:Yeah. I'm gonna let that sit with a big question mark because I think questions are so important, and not rushing to answer them is really important.
Wendy:Yeah. Yeah. So that's an invitation for anyone who might be listening too
Bonnie:is Beautiful.
Wendy:Who is the dreamer? Who is dreaming? Bonnie, you have this incredible book, which I highly recommend people run and purchase.
Bonnie:Thank you.
Wendy:But are there other ways in which you're working with people?
Bonnie:Yeah. So I have an institute that's called the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery. And at the institute, we do a lot of online classes. We do in person classes and workshops. I have a training program where I train practitioners.
Bonnie:People who have been trained are also teaching a lot of classes, and I do one on one work with people as well.
Wendy:Great. How how can people find you?
Bonnie:You can find me at bonniebuckner.com. You can find us at the institutefordreamingandimagery.com. If you're on Instagram, it's also bonniebucknerdot, spell it out, dot,com, or dreamwithiidi.
Wendy:Awesome. Alright. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on and
Bonnie:having me And by the way, if anybody listener conversation. I'm gonna be in your neck of the woods. Think I'm gonna be teaching at Kripalu in December around the solstice, December. Oh, great. Okay.
Bonnie:'25. So, yeah, check us out there.
Wendy:Awesome. Thank you.
Bonnie:Yeah. Thank you.
Wendy:Man, dreams are such rich creative territory. They're like little windows into different aspects of our consciousness. To learn more about Bonnie and her work and her new book, please visit institutefordreamingandimagery.com. I'll include a link in the show notes. Thanks for hanging out with me today.
Wendy:I'll be back before the December with my brilliant friend, Linda River Valente, who will treat us to an astrological glimpse into the first half of twenty twenty six. Is relief in sight? Well, stay tuned. Until next time.
