Exploring The Secret Mind With Bonnie Buckner

18 Sep , 2025 podcasts

 

If we want to move forward in life in the most meaningful ways possible, we must tap into our intuitive self and go beyond the tangible possibilities. Katherine Twells explores how to dive into your secret mind and the world of dreaming with creative dreamwork expert Bonnie Buckner. She explains how dreaming and imagery can lead to intense transformational experiences in your personal and professional lives. Bonnie also talks about the power of dreams to reinvigorate your creative self, escape the dullness of your daily routine, and greatly enhance your waking state. This eye-opening conversation is for anyone who wants to make sense of their dreams and use them to live a purposeful life.

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Exploring The Secret Mind With Bonnie Buckner

How Dreaming And Imagery Can Unlock Transformation

Greetings, friends, and welcome to the show. In business and in life, we are so often anchored in the mind as we formulate strategy and the best laid plans. We want tangible outcomes and certainty on the path forward. Albert Einstein once said that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them to unlock new potential, we have to look deeper to our intuition and great knowing only available in the mystery of life.

My guest takes us into that mystery into the secret mind and the world of dreaming. The wisdom that is found there can be the key to new perspective and even more powerful action. Bonnie Buckner has been teaching dreaming and imagery to individuals and organizations around the world for many years. She has brought this transformational work to such diverse fields as leadership, government, the performing and creative arts and academia.

She’s a senior fellow at George Washington University Center for Excellence and Public Leadership and serves as program lead for their One Humanity Leadership Coaching program, where she brings the institutes dream work to leadership development. She also co-hosts the One Humanity Lab show. Bonnie holds a PhD in Psychology. She’s a credentialed ICF Coach and a Certified Practitioner from the School of Images. She’s a former adjunct lecturer for the Fielding Graduate University in their Doctoral and Masters in Media Psychology and Social Change programs and has spoken internationally on various topics of dreaming, the imagination, cognition and the role of images in media and society.

We are speaking about her new book also titled, The Secret Mind. I experienced Bonnie’s work in the One Humanity Coaching program and I do know of the transformational power that can be experienced. There is so much more to us than we truly know and it’s just waiting there for our discovery. Now, let’s get to the conversation with the very wise Bonnie Buckner.

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My friend, Bonnie. It is so lovely to be with you again. I wish we were in person. Though, it was such a treat to be in person with you not that long ago. Thank you for making time while you were here in California. We first met when I was doing the executive leadership coaching program at GWU, which is an amazing program.

What was so fascinating in that program was when you entered the stage with our curriculum. I’m like, “We’re talking about dreaming in the executive leadership program. How fastening is that?” It was one of the favorite things about that entire journey that I was on. It was meeting you and learning about the work that you do. It’s fun after all these years to be having this conversation again with your new book.

Thank you. I’m super excited. I love talking to you as always. The only danger for our readers is that we love to talk to each other. Who knows how long this is going to go.

How Bonnie Began To Dream Intensely

I know. I promise you I’ll keep track of the time and I’ll promise our readers I will keep track of the time because it could go on and on. With that, let’s dig into your story. I always start these interviews with an origin story just to set the tone of who they’re reading. I always do the bio before we hit record so people will know that but what’s the real story of Bonnie? How did you get into this amazing work?

The story behind the story. It started when I was three. I was having a series of nightmares and it was disturbing to me. One morning, I was sitting on our front steps and I was thinking about this. I was thinking about it as a little kid does like, “Can I just never go to sleep again?” I was going through all these different thoughts in my mind. All of a sudden, it just hit me, “That’s why I’m here. I’m going to learn how to master my nightmares and teach other people how to do the same.”

Now, that was clear to me. It just hung out on the back burner as I grew up and did my life as a kid, doing the same crazy adolescent things as anybody. Not thinking about it, then it began to emerge again when I was older. I was starting my career and I began to dream very intensely. It came very much to the forefront. I just want to caveat that though with something. This is something you and I have talked about which is even though I back burner it, I talked about it. My family was very supportive of it.

My father and my grandmother were great dreamers. They talked to me about dreams and how to work with your dreams. It was always a very active thing like, if you look inside yourself you will find answers and you have to do something with it. That is the foundation of what I do. Look inside yourself, you find answers and you put it out into the world.

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That is such a beautiful thing on so many fronts. Not only what you’re talking about. We’re going to get so much deeper into this in our conversation, but there’s a couple things from your story. One is what a gift that your family encouraged. How many stories do you hear of a more creative, inspired path being shut down into some pragmatic money-making path? All the time we’re going to talk about creativity but that just gets like, “I’ll shut the door on that.”

What a gift you were given. The other thing that strikes me about this is that you had that knowing at three. That blows me away because I don’t know if we have much memory before the age of five. I read somewhere that you don’t remember a lot before the age of five. If I try to recall my three-year-old self, I can’t even imagine having wisdom at that point. However, as I say that, I know that when we come in, like we’re closer to that essence in our knowing before we get all piled on with the world. Maybe you were tapping into that but that amazes me, Bonnie, that you knew that.

The two go hand in hand and what I mean is, shut the door on that, that you said that parents, adults and mentors tend to do. They do it, by the way, with the best of intentions. They want their kids to do well in school and in their careers. It’s done with good intention. However, that is what causes all of our problems in the first place because we have an inner knowing. It’s very clear and it’s when we start to put that out in the world and it gets shut down that we begin to separate ourselves from that.

We begin to mistrust that. At the institute where I work, we have a young dreamer’s program. A lot of young people are pretty clear about a lot of things, their passions and interests. It may not unroll in the same way that they imagine it at that time, but the energy behind it will but it gets shut down later. The memory of it fades as well. I have such a clear memory of that because it was like, “That’s Bonnie and my family.” That was okay. I stuck it in my pocket and walked with it.

Here you are all these years later helping so many people with dream work and this beautiful book that you put out into the world. This is why I love hearing about origin stories because you look back and you can just see the emergence of somebody and how they come into their brilliance later on in life from seeds or experiences that happen to them very young. It’s so cool.

Understanding The Great Dream Of Self

I want to read this from your book as we launch into this because I loved the way you wrote this. This is from the part you talked about the great dream of self. You write, “Our first task of the imagination is to envision who we are in the life that we want to live. Within each of us is a great dream of self. It is who we are capable of becoming and what we are interested in discovering in order to one day contribute our own uniqueness back to the world.” I love that so much. That’s so powerful because in that sentence you encapsulate this whole idea of the great dream of self. Can you say more about that?

It’s exactly what we’ve been talking about. It’s this whole, life is an adventure. We know that as a kid because everything is about discovery. Stomping in a puddle is a discovery. It’s exciting. When we start to try and fit in, make our parents happy, make school happy and get good grades, we set aside those passions and curiosities. We try to do what we think we’re supposed to be doing but the great dream of self is what my passion is, what I want to explore and it’s naturally contributed.

It naturally wants to give back to the world. I think about the world as a great golden clock. Every one of us likes those intricate Swiss clocks, where every gear interlocks perfectly. Each one of us is one of those gears. If we’re contributing our uniqueness, then that clock is perfectly turning and working. If we don’t, then there’s a kink somewhere. Each one of us has to contribute ourselves to the world.

I don’t know if we ever talked about the golden clock in our other conversations, but I love that visual of how important that interconnectivity is. It is an interconnectivity with all of us and we all contribute. I was watching something. I think it was on social, a Reel. They were interviewing older people in their 80s and 90s about their regrets. They talked to people about their life.

Many of them were things like, “I wish I had lived for me. I wish I had trusted myself,” versus living a life of what they thought they should live. I think the invitation that we are talking about and as we get into the dreamscape is to embody and embrace that unique journey that we’re all supposed to be on and not something that the world or someone else in your life or your family tells you you need to be on.

Exactly. A long time ago, I was teaching media psychology for Fielding Graduate University. I was always on the lookout for different bits of material and images and things that I can use to talk about the cognitive psychology of images. One of the things that personally is very beautiful are illuminated manuscripts. Those manuscripts that you can find at the Huntingdon Library, where they have the illustrations and everything. They’re so beautiful.

I found this talk by a woman who said that when she was a little kid, her parents showed her one of these. She was like, “That’s what I’m going to do.” Nobody has done that for centuries. We don’t make illuminated manuscripts anymore. We make videos and shows, but that’s what she wanted to do. She goes into this long discussion about how she learned to take actual parchment. She went on a trip to one area in Northern France where there’s a snail that produces a certain ink and a certain color.

She did this A to Z and now she teaches at some big university in Europe. I thought that excites me so very much that somebody gets that into the thing that they love so much and how much that just enriched me. I’ll never do an illustrated manuscript, but knowing that and knowing how much she was into it. That’s living your great dream.

That is amazing. When you see people so passionate about what they’re doing, that is inspirational. That’s crazy.

See how much it moves everybody else? When we think about it, the more we root into what moves our own self. The more we do it, it naturally contributes. It inspires other people. It gets people going and their creativity. It’s important.

It’s such a different energy when you talk to people living that way, totally connected into their alignment versus, maybe we’ve had days like this. We’ve encountered people where you’re like, “How are you?” They’re like, “Living the dream,” said with a sarcastic aura. “Hanging in there,” and you’re like, “Oh.” Great if I have those days. I’m not saying life is all this easy blissful ride, but it’s an energy of moving in this creative aligned space versus like, “I’ve just got to survive.” It’s very different.

There’s a difference between a closed down heart that starts to become cynical and even bitter. I’m talking about long-term because as you said, we all have bad days or the heart that stays open and curious, which is a creative heart as well.

Addressing Today’s Alarming Crisis Of Creativity

Let’s use that to bridge into creativity because you begin the book on this whole crisis of creativity and this is a real issue. I don’t know if it has to do with technology and screens. I have to be honest. I’ve noticed my reading has dropped because I’m more on my phone, but this is happening in children. Creativity changes. Can you talk about what’s going on with that?

They’ve been recording creativity measurements for some decades now. It was discovered that from 1990 ‘till now, in America at least. There’s been a decline in creativity across all age groups. The ramifications of that are enormous. It is correlated with rises in nationalism as creativity drops because people look for things to be more solid instead of being able to play with something and open something out.

It leads to many other things. We don’t even have to look very far to think about as a global community. We have a lot of issues facing us. We have climate change and social injustice. If we’re looking at things through a very patterned or small perspective lens, we can’t solve those problems. We have to get creative to do that. Dreaming and creativity are intricately linked. From a neurological basis, they work with primarily the same neurological processing part of our brain and so is the default network but even more than that.

 

This is where, as you know from the coaching program, it’s about how we work with our dreams. If I’m able to just write my dreams in a dream journal with no editing and no judging. I can’t tell you the number of people who come to me and say, “I didn’t dream.” I’d start asking a few questions and it turns out they did.

They dreamed a long dream but then they started telling me, “I was embarrassed, or I didn’t want to say this.” If we can start to dream and have the courage to see that and say, “Instead of judging this, what if? What is this part of me? What ideas could this inspire in me?” That already starts to open the door to a much bigger relationship. Not only with ourselves but in our creative interaction in the world.

Bonnie, we’ve all had those dreams that they’re just so out there. I know. I’ve had someone like, “I’m concerned about myself.” In our waking, potentially trying to be a civilized world, of all the ways we properly are. Our dreamscape allows us to go into so many different dimensions and to your point, we can’t judge too quickly what they mean because it’s like, “What is that?” It’s so fascinating. We talked before we hit record for a moment about this whole concept of surrender versus control. This idea of curiosity and surrender is at the heart of the creative process.

You’re giving yourself over to a little bit of magic, a little bit of unload, and who doesn’t need more magic in their life, especially in the Western world. It’s so pragmatic and analytical. You use the word solid and we have to be doing this and be in our masculine and be in our action and do all these things. Versus allowing ourselves to play.

It’s too serious. Who says work has to be serious? I’ll speak to that for just a moment because it’s a thing. We think about work as, “It’s got to be serious. I’m an adult now. I have to act like an adult and be serious.” I moved to France a few years ago. I was asked to participate in a vendange at an organic winery. A vendage is grape harvest. My neighbor came and knocked on my door at like 4:00 AM. I roll out of bed. I have no idea what I’m going to expect. I’m grouchy. It’s 4:00 AM. The sun’s not up yet.

We go out to this vineyard and then line up each person in pairs. Each person on each side of the vine and we just go down the vine harvesting these grapes. People burst into song. They all know the songs. They were old French folk songs. They’re singing. Dogs are running. Kids are chasing the dogs. The sun starts coming up. Butterflies are flying. At one point, there’s a guy walking up down the roads with a big basket taking the grapes we harvested.

He’s just pouring sweat, buckets of sweat and I made some commons about that. He said, “Is there anything better to do?” Not in a cynical way but in a happy way like, “I can’t imagine doing anything better than this.” It was so celebratory. The whole thing was harvested before lunchtime. There’s nothing that says that you can’t have fun and be productive at exactly the same time.

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I love that story. For anyone reading this, I would just like you to pause for a minute and think of the last time you had an experience like that. Maybe it was just laughing until you’re crying with coworkers or dancing or just letting yourself play. Seriously, think about it. If it’s been a long time, the question might be, why? Why are we not having more moments like that in our lives? We have one life. We can play. We’re giving everyone permission to do that.

Peeling The Layers Of The Dream Work

This is what we said the readers are going to be like, “Bonnie and Katherine are talking.” We should get back to my questions about dreams because now we’re talking about the joy of life, which is a very good topic of conversation. I want to start getting into some of the layers of the dream work. The first thing, because I guarantee you, I mind reading people. There are people out there saying, “I don’t dream. I don’t remember them.” I know you’ve encountered this a lot, but talk about that because I know we do dream. If you can’t remember, what is a way to start remembering and begin this practice?

Everybody dreams every night. We all dream. Relax. It’s just a question of remembering them. The thing that helps and every neuroscientist will tell you this. It’s just having the intention to remember. We can fuel that intention by getting a journal that we love, putting it by the bed, pin on it, and make sure we write down everything when we wake up. Now, all before we hit record you had mentioned something about a robust practice versus little bits and pieces. It’s all one practice.

There are some nights where we have little bits and pieces of snippets. That’s still a dream. I have taught a two-hour class on a one sentence dream before. It can be that rich. There is an inner knowing that is associated with our images. When we just play with it, consider it, listen to how it resonates. Who knows? Some big idea might come up. Other times, we have those long dreams, that more robust thing that you were speaking to, where it’s the full story. Also interesting, but we can’t discount the little bits and pieces because they speak to us, too.

Going back to where I started the episode and I mentioned meeting you through the GW the leadership coaching program. People might think, “Where does dream work fit in a coaching program? Where does it fit in business or leadership or all those things? Why do I need to do that? I have all these things in my waking life.” What’s the case for dreaming and all of these other domains?

There’s a few points on that. We talked a little bit about creativity. If I want to solve the challenges in my life, I have to think, see and do something different than what I’m doing now. That’s basic. That doing something, seeing something and being different, how big or how small I’m able to do that has a direct result of what I’m going to live. The more I’m able to be creative about my own problem-solving and the more imaginative I am to imagine bigger things, the more I can expand my own life. When it comes to leadership and coaching, first of all, there’s two ways that we think. I’m talking from a neurological way.

 

We think in terms of a linear thought which is causal, which is always rooted in either the past or the future. “I did this, therefore, I’m going to do that.” That’s where most executives hang out. They look at reports of how last quarter was. They make a decision of where they’re going. They look at what’s worked in the past. Maybe they tweaked just a little to go somewhere else. Experiential cognition which is the same as creativity and dreaming. It’s a very different non-linear, non-causal way of processing information.

It’s where multiple different pieces of known information are like in a super collider. They banged together and had a completely different outcome. It’s much more present tense and then it opens out into a mystery. It’s up to me. Do I make that the future? Do I make it into something else? It’s always routed into the now. I find with a lot of leaders that this fear of trying out new things is huge.

If I have been doing okay in the last few quarters and I am thinking, “I need to keep my job.” Keep your head down and keep it going is a lot of thought. That becomes, I use solid before, I can say now rigid. It becomes stale. It’s not the way to innovate. Everybody’s looking for innovation but nobody wants to take the risk to do it. That’s the crazy thing. Doing this dream work is like training wheels of playing with unusual ideas and learning how to look inside the self and reflect in a much deeper way.

I love that, Bonnie. I feel like there’s an alchemy to this. The other dynamics were dealing with business and anyone who’s working and managing a family and all the things in life. We’re so busy. We have so much going on. This technology and screens have filled every waking moment. We can’t even sit in line without looking at a phone. The times when that creative muscle, that daydreaming, that potential would come in. A lot of those spaces have been erased going back to the creativity issues that we have.

In business, we’re living with deadlines and more has to happen and fewer people to do more. If you’re a public company, its short-term results and what your stock price is. You can just imagine how all these things are putting a damper on this ability to let something percolate or try something new or different. I had my team together in a meeting.

We ended up talking about a solution around a couple of team members on how we might restructure their roles. All of us sitting together and having a focused conversation about it and we came up with this idea none of us would have thought about if we were just offline down the highway separately. I think we’re in a bit of a crisis of not having that white space.

Every neuroscientist who studies this is going to talk about that as well because that is executive thinking and the default network, linear thinking and non-linear thinking. They’re meant to talk to each other. We’re meant to have a very active imagination that draws from what we know, what other new input is coming in from the outside and creates something new out of it. That executive network that’s all about goal-oriented thinking takes that material, and then executes it. Hence, the executive network.

The problem is, when we use technology, it’s all executive networks. It’s goal focused. We’re scrolling and looking at things. That cross talk between these two parts of our brain, let’s say. It’s more a looped processing system but that crosstalk needs to be fed. It’s not being fed now and it’s a real big problem. Not just technology but also like you say those quiet moments. When’s the last time you laid on the grass and looked at clouds? This is always when we get our best ideas. Here’s a very easy example for people.

All of us have been standing in the shower one day and suddenly, “Oh,” and we get it. We get the answer to something or what we need to say to somebody or idea. Something. It’s because we relax. We slide into daydreaming which is the same thing as the default network. It allows these new ideas to come forward.

We’re talking about the idea of imagination, slowing down and creativity and all the things that that could create for us. Even going back to the goal and clock, how we discover our authentic road in the slide. We’re making the case for creating this type of space in your life. One of the ways to tap into the alchemy is in the dream space. In chapter one, you have a quote in there, “A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is unopened.” As people are reading, can you imagine having information given to you from a sacred place that you choose to not look at? Not open and not read. For me, that is so much of the, why do we want to go on this journey into the dream space?

We have multiple interests, ideas and ways that were understanding the world. All these insights percolate inside of us at all times. If we fill ourselves with the many distractions of now, the distractions of technology and of being just so busy. We don’t access them. It’s like literally having a treasure chest in a closet somewhere that you decide never to open.

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Unpacking The Different Types Of Dreams

Now, in this book there’s no way in the time that we have that because there’s seven different types of dreams, I believe, four different levels. This is not just your dream and you assess it. There are all these types of dreams that are shaping how we use them. Can you talk a little bit but again, we can’t go through all of them, but headline a little bit about why there are different types of dreams? How do they serve us?

Let’s talk about a nightmare because everybody has them. People who do dream generally say, “I had a nightmare. I get it.” Nightmares are our friend because nightmares are short. It’s cute. It’s showing us that there is a very specific entangled energy inside of ourselves, anger or fear. It’s like a little knot and there’s going to be a corresponding waking time knot in our waking time. When we pay attention to that nightmare, we can look and see where I am living this and then we can start to untangle those conflicts.

That opens us out to dream a different dream, to make the changes we need to make in our life and also to receive a different dream because it’s all about our inner energy. A clear dream is more refined. Let’s say we deal with nightmares. It’s like cleaning the house. I’ve cleaned the house. I’ve dealt with some nightmares and I’m open to getting a clear dream. That shows me my block, how to get over the block and also a latent potential.

Something in me that is an asset or talent that I’m not using that I’ve allowed to be hidden under that block. When I have that dream, I can take that forward, make it activated in my waking life and go somewhere new. The difference between a nightmare and a clear dream is a lot like a nightmare being putting out fires and a clear dream being like a strategic plan. It’s like going to move me somewhere new. A great dream is where that mystery comes in like, “That’s a big idea.” It’s a big experience or it’s a big love. Big love is also something that shows in our dream space. Great dreams are messages or jewel colors or some expanded experience.

That’s beautiful. I can think about different dreams I’ve had in all those different categories. It’s a whole different feeling. I can think of certain great dreams where I’ve woken up and it’s just been this magical feeling like, “That was so cool.” None of us like nightmares but to your point, it’s good to know that there are friends because they’re waking us up to something that we need to understand and work through.

Look at that wonderful quilt of being a human that gets so together with all of us. We all have different nightmares. We have clear dreams and then we have these births of great dreams and big love in our life. The whole of it is being a human. Knowing that we have these different kinds of dreams helps us to see our waking time as being composed of these different elements which expands our sense of being a human.

Now, the book is titled The Secret Mind, but I know I heard in another interview that you did that dreams come from the body more than the mind. Can you talk about that distinction?

Everybody thinks that dreams come from the head and it is true that there is neural activity when we’re dreaming. When I say they come from the body, what I’m talking about is we live in a vehicle called our body. It’s going out in the world. I use a friend of mine’s expression of, our skin spacesuit. We’re going out and taking samples of the world. We’re exploring. Things come in through our senses. We have experiences. The body has different responses to these things. It’s not just neutral.

It’s very simple. If I eat something I love, the body expands and lights up. Likewise, if I have an interaction with somebody that didn’t feel quite right. The body might close in on me. The body is moving in response to what we’re living. That movement and how it feels, what it’s knowing and how it’s understanding and the analogies that provokes and the emotions that pull up. That is an image inside of ourselves. The body makes the image, then we can look at the image and we can talk about it going to the brain and everything. Everything in this world begins with an embodied experience.

Deciphering The Secret Messages Of Your Dreams

We’re beginning to understand that connection. Even the new science of the neurological cells that are in the gut and we’re going to talk a little bit about intuition. We are not like our bodies just carrying around our head. That’s the computer. This is a fully integrated system. Everything that happens all through our experiences is coming in through the whole mechanism of being human, which is beautiful. That’s an important distinction. Bonnie, can you share a story because stories are great? You’ve worked with a ton of people. You’ve had your own experience of where someone was able to maybe work through a problem or do something creative from a certain dream that stands out to you at least.

The first one that comes to mind is somebody. I’ll talk about courage because here’s the thing. I work with a lot of different leaders, people, organizations and startups. There’s a lot of great ideas in the world and I’ve never seen one fail because of a bad idea. It’s always a people problem. It’s a lack of courage or a conflict between teammates. The story I’m thinking about is about someone who was asked to interview for a position that would be a promotion. I was at a different company and it would have been a promotion for this person.

They didn’t call back and this person thought, “That’s not for me.” She liked the idea but it’s not for her. All that goes on and you would think you would just forget about that and keep going but then she has this dream that she walks into space. There’s three white tables and she recognizes it as the space of the interview. There’s an envelope on each of these tables. She knows the thoughts an offer and there’s a very specific number written on one of these envelopes she looks at.

She wakes up and she knows she’s going to get this offer. That envelope, that number, she knows that’s the amount of money she’s going to get. It’s way higher than she would have ever thought to ask for and it was way higher than what the job she interviewed for was supposed to be. A week later, they called her, “We’re sorry. We had some change over, but now we’re back into the recruitment. We want to talk to you. In fact, we want to offer you the job.” She goes, “Great.” They give her a lowball number.

She says, “If I hadn’t had that dream, even that low ball offer was more than what I was making at the time and I would have said yes to it but I had the dream and I said that number and they didn’t reject it.” They said, “Give us a bit.” They came back and it was maybe like at $1,000 off and they accepted it. She said for her, it was a career first. She didn’t imagine she could ever make that much and it was that dream that gave her that umph to be able to put herself out there and ask for what she needed and what she wanted.

That one almost seemed, I want to say more obvious or more direct with that dream. There’s probably some that was like a pink elephant where it was abstract. You probably get that too, where you have to maybe pull off the layers of what you feel because that’s a big part of it too. They’re like dream dictionaries. If you see a lion, it means this. That doesn’t work. Talk about the difference of how you would pull the thread through a little more abstract dream.

By the way, there were a lot more abstract elements in that dream. I gave you guys a thumbnail version because sometimes dreams can go on. Another person had a dream where the dream starts in a room with family. It’s a small room. It feels like a claustrophobic room. The person sits there for some time and then sees a door. They go through the door then there’s this long series of going into these different rooms. Finally, an auditorium and there’s a spotlight up ahead.

The person says, “It’s dark,” because there’s only this one light. The person wakes up and thinks, “I should have turned on the light.” Now, one of the questions we can ask in dreaming. If there’s people in the dream that we know in waking time, even if it’s maybe like a famous person because we tend to have certain ideas about famous people. “They’re the person.” We asked. So and so is the person who. Family in a small claustrophobic room and asking about how family is. They see things in a certain way, but then this client moves and moves and moves beyond that to open new doors.

They wake up thinking, “I should have brought more light in the room.” That’s where they tricked themselves. The real necessity is, “I should have stepped in the spotlight.” When we’re in a family, we tend to hide aspects of ourselves. We tend to fit in like, “I’m the one who has those crazy ideas. I’m not going to tell them to my family.” Sometimes, family is indicative of a certain hiding or a certain old family pattern. We have to individuate. We have to step into the spotlight of the self. Some of the work also that I do is I teach people how to go back into the dream and do that very thing, step into the spotlight or whatever is needed.

How Dreams Can Enhance Our Waking State

Listening to you share this, Bonnie. From all your experience, you have such a wise way of interpreting that dream. What a valuable coach you are for people who are trying to understand this at a deeper level. I know where we’re coming to the end of our time together, but I want to ask one more question about the dance between the day and the night.

Near the end of the book, you talk about intuition. We haven’t had time to get into it but you get into a life plan in a way to use this for people. Not just, “I wrote this down,” but like, how do I start mapping my life in a larger way? Which is fantastic. I feel like the more we work in the dreamscape and listen in our waking hours to our intuition, that goes back to the alchemy and the richness. How does working on dreams enhance what we perceive in the waking state?

That’s a great question because as you know in the coaching program, for example. The ICF coaching program says, “One of the capacities that coaches need to have is to be intuitive.” They don’t say what that means or how. Many leaders are told intuitively leadership or being intuitive but no one says how. No one operationalizes that. Intuition and dreaming are just two ways of saying the same thing. A day, I can talk about when the sun is out or the moon is out. It’s still a day.

There’s the nighttime dreaming looking inside and the daytime intuition. In order for me to even get an intuitive hit on something, I have to be open enough to listen to myself. If I work on my night dreams, I open myself up to being more intuitive. If I work on my intuition, I open myself up to listening to my night dreams. It is seamless.

Keeping A Dream Journal And Other Practices To Try

If you want to do more of that and you mentioned the journal. If we leave people with tangible lives, what can I do to have a more robust practice? You mentioned the journal and the pen, but what other guidance would you have for people who are resonating with what we’re talking about but need to get off the mark and do more in this space?

It’s about learning to listen inside and listening inside. If it was easy, we would all do it. Outside is like major, loud, billboard and lots of messages. Inside is a very subtle message. Beginning to pay attention to when something moves on our inside, very often when people are posed with a decision to make something moves on the inside. It either says, “That’s interesting. It expands,” or it pulls back just a little bit. Tuning in to the body and taking it as a real bit of information. will start to open this up to getting even more information.

Tune in to your body to get every bit of information you can from it. Share on X

What I hear you saying, Bonnie, is we need to slow down. We need to listen. Even before we hit record, you were asking me how I was and I was talking about my own practices of a deeper listening versus more doing. That is the challenge in our world. It’s to give ourselves the time to slow down, to listen, and to trust our own voice. Not the voice of a thousand other people or culture and give us the time to sleep. We didn’t even get into what’s happening with people not sleeping and giving them a chance to dream.

Get In Touch With Bonnie

As we close this out, that would be my wish, my challenge and we share this to those reading. Give yourself the gift of listening. Give yourself the gift of this work because so much can unfold from this. How can people find you? I already mentioned you are such a gifted guide in this book. I know we’ll serve so many people called The Secret mind but if people want to know more about you, other than reading the book, how will they find you?

You can go to the website BonnieBuckner.com. My Instagram is @BonnieBucknerDotCom. I teach classes at the InstituteForDreamingAndImagery.com and their Instagram is @DreamWithIIDI.

Bonnie, I have loved every minute of this dance with you. Thank you. It’s so fun to know. From meeting you in the program to seeing this book come to life and be born and how you are sharing your wisdom with so many people. It’s just amazing to watch. Thank you for all of it.

Thank you and thank you for all that you do because we’re both dreamers out there in the world. It’s fantastic. That also is great. Contact the dreamers in your life. Talk about it. It’s so supportive and so useful.

It’s fun to dream together. Maybe if we did a little more dreaming together, we can dream up a better world.

We can for sure.

 

Important Links

• Bonnie Buckner
• Bonnie Buckner on LinkedIn
• Bonnie Buckner on Instagram
• @DreamWithIIDI on Instagram
• One Humanity Leadership Coaching
• One Humanity Lab
• School of Images
• The Secret Mind
• International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery

 

About Bonnie Buckner

Bonnie has been teaching dreaming and imagery to individuals and organizations around the world for over twenty years. She has brought this transformative work to such diverse fields as leadership, government, the performing and creative arts, and academia.

Bonnie is a Senior Fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Excellence in Public Leadership and serves as Program Lead for their One Humanity Leadership Coaching program where she brings the Institute’s dreamwork to leadership development. She also co-hosts the One Humanity Lab’s podcast.

Bonnie holds a PhD in psychology, is a PCC ICF credentialed coach, and a certified practitioner from the School of Images. Bonnie is a former adjunct lecturer for Fielding Graduate University in their doctoral and master’s in Media Psychology and Social Change programs and has spoken internationally on various topics of dreaming, the imagination, cognition, and role of images in media and society.

Bonnie is the author of The Secret Mind: Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform Your Life. She writes the blog The Secret Mind for Psychology Today and contributions to Medium.

 

 

Cognitive Psychology, Creative Heart, Dream Work, Dreamscape, Golden Clock, intuition

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