If you ever have awakened thinking, “What on earth was THAT dream about?” — you’re not alone. But what if your dreams aren’t random? What if they’re coded messages from a deeper part of your mind… designed to guide you?

In this powerful episode of Women Road Warriors with Shelley Johnson and Kathy Tuccaro, we talk with Dr. Bonnie Buckner, creative dreamwork expert, founder of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery, and author of The Secret Mind: Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform Your Life. Dr. Buckner reveals that every single one of us has a “secret mind” — a hidden powerhouse in the brain that activates during dreaming. Drawing from neurobiology and social psychology, she explains how this secret mind helps us:

✨ Solve stubborn problems

✨ Process emotional “unfinished business”

✨ Tap into creativity and intuition

✨ Discover purpose

✨ Unlock our fullest potential

✨Use dreamwork for a more intentional, empowered life.

Whether your dreams feel like chaotic movies, symbolic puzzles, or total blanks you can’t remember, Dr. Buckner shows why they still matter — and how to use them as tools for self-growth, clarity, and decision-making. If you’re curious about the mind, seeking clarity, or craving deeper self-understanding, this episode will open a door you didn’t know existed.

👉 Listen to this episode to unlock the secret mind inside you — and awaken your potential.

bonniebuckner.com

https://institutefordreamingandimagery.com/

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Women Road Warriors, podcast, empowerment talk show, Shelley Johnson, Shelley M. Johnson, Kathy Tuccaro, Dr. Bonnie Buckner, Institute 4 Dreaming and Imagery, empowering women, dream interpretation, creative dream work, neurobiology of dreams, personal development, unlocking potential, dream journaling, self-discovery through dreams, women empowerment podcast, dream analysis

This is Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Tucaro.

From the corporate office to the cab of a truck, they're here to inspire and empower women in all professions.

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Welcome.

We're an award winning show dedicated to empowering women in every profession through inspiring stories and expert insights.

No topics off limits on our show, we power women on the road to success with expert and celebrity interviews and information you need.

I'm Shelley.

And I'm Kathy.

We all dream when we sleep, even if we don't remember our dreams.

Dreams are often a curiosity.

Many times they seem like a disjointed movie.

But what do they mean?

Did you know that there's power in your dreams?

They send us a message.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner is a creative dream work expert who says you can use your dreams as a tool to solve your challenges, develop your fullest potential, and live a life of purpose.

She draws her methods from neurobiology and social psychology.

Dr. Buckner is the founder and CEO of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery.

She says we all have a secret mind, which is the part of our brain that gives us the tools we need to resolve unsolved or address unfinished business.

When you're awake, they're accessed in our dreams.

She's the author of the Secret Unlock the power of dreams to transform your life.

Kathy and I wanted to learn more, so we invited her on our show.

Welcome, Bonnie.

Thank you for being with us.

Thank you so much for having me here.

This is going to be so exciting.

Yeah.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I am tickled pink.

I got so much to say.

Absolutely.

Me too.

Bonnie, if you wouldn't mind, before we start talking about dreams, give us a brief background of what you do and how you got started in all of this.

Yeah.

So I work with people, organizations, using dreams and inner imagery, our spontaneous imagination, to develop the self and to problem solve and to enhance creativity.

And I honestly, it all started when I was 3 years old and I had a series of nightmares.

And I. I just didn't think, I can't go on having all these nightmares.

And I was thinking about, you know, how can I just never go to sleep again?

You know?

And as a kid, I was thinking, well, what is the Guinness Book of World Records for never sleeping?

Right?

And then it just kind of hit me, maybe there's a way to master these nightmares, and maybe that's what I'm here to do.

And so I kind of have carried that with me for, as I was growing up, this idea of Working with dreams.

Dreams are important, and there's ways that we can transform our dreams.

And then I.

Through a series of dreams.

And know Kathy was saying when we were talking before we started that she's also had dreams very important as signposts in her life.

I just have always paid attention to my dreams.

And then through a series of dreams, I met the person that I learned this approach to dreams.

I use an ancient approach to dreaming that I add modern insights from neuroscience and cognitive psychology to.

And I studied with her, Dr. Kathryn Schamberg, for over 10 years.

And then I went back to school and got my PhD in psychology with my research devoted to understanding the role of images in behavioral change, seeing that images are what populate our dreams.

Wow, that's really heavy.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it's so fascinating.

I've always wondered about dreams.

I think a lot of people do.

What exactly are dreams and why do we have them?

You know, I think of dreams.

You've used the word heavy.

I think of dreams as sort of a light companion.

Okay.

And if you think about it, we are in this physical thing called a body, and we kind of motor around in this sort of, you know, alien planet that we call our life.

And we're like taking samples and having experiences and trying to make sense and understand everything that we live.

And we bring the world into us through our senses.

We taste, we smell, we see, we hear, we touch, and we take all of that information and we create knowings and understandings and ideas about the world in which we live and how we want to live in it.

And so all of that living that we do, and especially these days, we have such busy lives.

We're so focused on out outside things, goals, objectives, to do, lists.

But inside we have all kinds of ideas and responses to everything that we're living.

And we just don't take a lot of time to tune into it.

And when we finally go to sleep at night, then we can see all of these different images that are formed to show us what these responses are.

You know, dreams aren't just images.

They're also things that spark understandings and knowings and intuitions, and they're also emotional and felt physical events.

You know, sometimes people tell me, I had this nightmare like three days ago, and I can't shake it off.

And that's because we're still kind of feeling and resonating with something that we're experiencing on the inside in response to things that have happened in the outside in our waking time.

So dreams are kind of a way to give us the full picture of what we're living and what we're understanding about the things that we're living.

It's also very interesting what happens in the brain.

I had heard in the past that dreams are just basically a way for us to process the day.

Do you agree with that?

Well, I don't think it's that simplistic.

I think that, you know, we are so much more than we allow ourselves to be generally.

And so much of our potentials, I call them latent potentials, are things that like our more courageous sides or the parts of ourselves that we would like to exercise or just passions and dreams and the more common sense that we use the word of things we really want to do or explore in life.

And we don't allow those parts of ourselves to see the light of day very frequently because again, back to our busy lifestyles or also because somewhere along the way someone may have said, yeah, but get serious, you can't make a living doing that.

Or our family doesn't do that.

We're not creative people.

I, I, I hear so many different belief systems in my work with people that families sort of pass on generation to generation thinking they're, you know, passing on words of wisdom.

But in fact they can be very limiting to what people really want to do with their lives and dreams.

Sort of plug us back into those parts of ourself that are there, they're right there, but we're maybe not exercising it in the way we're living.

Interesting.

What are we accessing in our brain in a dream?

I mean, what, what's going on?

I mean are there different parts of our brain that are lighting up while we're sleeping?

What's happening?

Yeah, and you know, I want to say this, that dreams are a full body event.

So we experience the world and then think about it.

And what I mean by that happens very quickly in our brains.

But we really do feel, touch, taste, smell.

Our center of proprioception knows where we are in a room.

And all of that information comes into our body first before we start thinking about it.

And so when we have these dreams, we're experiencing them physically as well.

You know, sometimes people wake up and their heart is pounding because they had this super scary dream or they feel a sense of expansion because they maybe flew in their dream and saw this beautiful, beautiful landscape or vista.

So they're a full bodied experience.

And on a very basic level in our brain, I'm going to talk super simple here.

We have kind of two processing systems, cognitive processing systems.

And one is the default network.

Default meaning that's our go to and that's the part that's responsible for dreaming and creativity, the imagination.

And then we have the executive network, which is those goal directed things, two plus two equals four.

And we exercise that executive network all day long.

We're sitting in front of the computer, we're checking things off a list.

And that's why I don't know if this has ever happened to you two ladies.

If you've ever like been in the shower and suddenly it's like, oh, that's the idea.

That's what I need.

That's how I'm going to solve that problem.

Oh yeah, the aha moment.

Yeah, the aha moments.

And the thing about the aha moments is that's when the default network switches back on because the default network and the executive network can't be on at the same time.

They switch back and forth so we can't be adding something up.

And then we're relaxing into the aha moments at the same time.

They're meant to talk to each other.

So when we get in the shower, we're totally relaxed.

We're not really thinking.

In other words, we're daydreaming.

And that's the exact same center that lights up in our brain when we're night dreaming as well.

Stay tuned for more of Women Road warriors coming up.

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Welcome back to Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Tucaro.

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If you've ever awakened from a dream thinking, what on earth was that about?

You're not alone.

We all dream, even when we don't remember them.

But what if those strange nighttime movies are actually powerful messages and tools?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner says they absolutely are.

She's a creative dream work expert, founder of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery, and author of the Secret Unlock the power of dreams to transform your life.

Her work blends neurobiology and social psychology to show that every one of us has a hidden, secret mind, a powerhouse inside the brain that helps us solve problems, finish emotional business, and tap into our fullest potential.

Dr. Buckner's been giving us some initial insight into the science of dreams.

It's really fascinating, Boddy.

I see in your book you have four levels of dreaming.

I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about that and maybe then digress.

I know Kathy's had amazing dreams.

I kind of wanted to have her chat a little bit about that because it's amazing the kind of inspiration she's gotten from her dreams.

What are the four levels of dreaming?

Yeah, so the four levels is a rubric for dreams, but also waking life.

And it's a way of moving more deeply into what's really happening.

So the first level is just the story.

It's the dream that you would write down in your dream journal in waking time.

It's that thing that you would pick up the phone and call your best friend and say, oh, my gosh, you're never going to believe what happened to me right now.

So that's story.

It's the literal telling of something.

But then go one level deeper, and that's the level of pattern or resonance.

And maybe we find, when we're talking to that friend, I kind of feel like this has happened to me before, but with a different person, you know, or someone told me the other day I literally dated the same man three different times.

Different guys, but same kind of guy three different times before I found my husband.

You know, we.

We make patterns all the time.

So with dreams, we can look within the dream and see, like, what.

What is repeating?

And is that thing that is repeating, is it a block?

Or is it something the dream is really trying to show me that's more of a possibility that I need to be looking at in myself.

And then the third level is the level of question or deeper, meaning if I put my finger on pattern, then I'm able to start asking questions.

Questions like, if it's just, you know, bananas, bananas, bananas.

Can I think about oranges or can I think about apples?

Why am I staying in this one small lane?

Are there other things that I can consider or.

Or is it.

I had never thought about bananas before, and now I'm getting an exclamation point that maybe I should bring bananas into the picture.

So patterns kind of show us where.

It's kind of like a sort of, you know, little flag of like, hey, check this out.

A little deeper.

And so if we start to ask questions about that, insights arise.

And that brings us to the fourth level, which is the level of mystery.

And that's where things get super interesting.

Because when we sit, I call it sitting in the question mark.

If we really sit in the question mark of what do I really want to be doing?

Or if I'm saying that I have no time, what would I do with all the time in the world?

And really sit in that question mark and allow what comes up, then life opens up in a lot of different directions for us.

Dreams are really insightful, and it's almost like the human brain knows a lot more than it lets on.

Dreams have managed my life, Honest to God, Dreams have.

Oh, yeah, 100%.

I started dreaming very young and very vividly.

Like, holy smokes.

Growing up in a very abusive background and very violent and unsafe area.

It's almost as if the dream world became my.

My safety net.

And I. I was taught by, I guess you could call them spiritual guides at a very young age how to become invisible in my dreams when something would happen when.

When I'd be attacked.

I was taught I could fly in my dreams.

I would go to different worlds.

I would travel to different planets.

I would go to temples in the sk.

Would.

It wasn't always beautiful.

I also went to places where there was a lot of entities, right?

A lot of evil entities.

I think that only started when we started playing the Ouija board as teenagers.

And it's almost like it opened up a portal.

And I'd get attacked in my dreams so bad.

I remember countless times where I would be hit in the dream state.

Say I'd get punched in the stomach by this entity.

I would wake up and I literally had fallen out of my bed and I would hurt for three days where that entity had Hit me or stabbed me or whatever.

Right.

And physically, I could feel the ache.

Like it was just so, so vivid.

It's almost like it's just a fine line between Earth and the astral plane or the dream.

Dream plane.

Not only that, but the dreams have also guided me with.

Into showing me what I needed to do next.

I knew way ahead of time that I would be hired into the position I'm in now at work.

I knew three months in advance.

I had big congratulations.

And it's kind of a.

There's different levels in the dreams where I go.

And so I know that it's real.

Like, it's not just imagination.

It's not my subconscious wanting me to have this happen.

It's an actual place.

So it's really hard to describe.

And I talked about a dream journal as well.

To this day, when I dream, I'll go back and I'll write, write, write, and it blows my mind.

Some of the dreams that I've had, most of them are very.

You know what I mean?

Premonitory.

Yeah, premonitory.

There you go.

Yeah.

Well, let's go back to this congratulations dream about the job that you knew in advance you would get.

Yeah, I.

One of the things I write about in the Secret Mind is a client of mine who had some people recommend that she talked to somebody and she spoke about a job, and she was in an okay job, but she spoke to these people, and it would have been a better job.

And then nothing really happened.

And, like, almost a year went by, and then she had this dream that she saw.

She walked into the room at this new location where it would have been, and there were three white tables with envelopes on them.

And she knew that was a job offer and opened it.

And the envelope had a certain number on it that she knew to be her salary.

Well, she wakes up and, you know, this had been in her mind, dead in the water.

Nothing had really happened.

And then, like a day or two later, they called and asked if she wanted to interview again.

And she spoke with them, and then they made her an offer.

And here's where it gets really interesting.

They made her an offer that she said to me.

In any other time, I would have just said, yeah, that's fine.

She goes, but because that number in the dream was higher and would have been like, a career best for me, I asked for that number.

And they said, let's get back to you.

And they Came back to her and they were only just, you know, a couple of hundred dollars off of that.

And she said I would never have had the confidence to, you know, punt that that much higher up and ask for that.

And her dreams really helped her to do that.

So back to you, Kathy.

I'm.

I'm curious.

When you said had that congratulations dream, how did that help you?

And then landing that job and waking time?

Actually I was training.

I'm a heavy equipment operator, the largest mining equipment in the world.

And this dream happened when I was in training.

They were training 16 of us but they weren't going to hire everyone, they were just going to hire a certain amount.

And I had the dream three months before the end of this training course.

And what that did for me was just build my self confidence because I, it's like instead of worrying because back then I was, I had zero self esteem and you know, zero self confidence.

And so instead of focusing on oh my God, I'm not good enough, I can't do this.

I knew I had the job.

So all of a sudden it just, it enabled me to hop on that equipment and do my best because I knew I already had the job.

Right.

Yeah.

So it gave me a backbone.

Really?

Yeah.

That is fantastic.

And that's one of the things that's the, that sort of, you know, abstract thing that happens inside of us.

The courage, the backbone.

You know, we talk about these things and then.

But what does that really mean and what does that look like and how do we access, access that in ourself.

And that's one of the things that dreams can really help us to do.

Dreams are phenomenal.

It can bring you.

I don't know about you, but I've been able to.

I've had dreams of past lives.

Like I think I dreamed of 10 different different lives that I've had and really experienced that whole lifetime.

And it's, it's shocking because it, what, what that did was give me an understanding of where I am today and why things have happened in my life.

You know, the karmic balance and people don't understand, oh, why does this happen to me?

I'm such a good person.

Well, no, there's more to it than that.

And so not only have dreams enabled me to understand who I am as I stand today, but they've also given me a path of understanding in such like here's an example.

Like, you have to quit, right?

And these dreams were so vivid and so consistent until the very last day where finally this giant scroll popped up.

And my name is on the scroll and it says, kathy, you must not drink alcohol.

God needs you in one year's time, and you must not drink.

All of a sudden, I'm pulled out of my body and I'm looking at myself below and I'm drink vodka.

And all I see is this ripple of black tar, poisonous energy exuding from me and killing everything around me.

And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm doing that.

But then I get pulled back to the scroll.

And the scroll says, but for every ounce of love that you sow, 100,000 people are uplifted.

Once again, I'm pulled up.

I'm a pulled above.

And I'm looking at myself below.

But this time, I have a golden heart.

A really big golden heart.

And out of this heart is the colors of the rainbow.

And it goes all across the world.

And in that moment, I understood that love overrules any negative power or any.

Anything.

Love is the answer.

So then back to the scroll and it says, you must not drink alcohol.

God needs you in one year's time.

And as I'm.

As I'm pulling out of the dream, the woman, There's a woman saying, you must remember this dream.

You must remember this dream.

So I wake up and I'm like, oh, my God, right?

If I drink, I'm gonna get cast a stone or something like from the Bible.

Like, you know, God's telling me not to drink.

And a year to the day of that dream, I got the call from ExxonMobil asking me for a verbal offer of employment to be hired for them.

And I.

Obviously, I took it.

But yeah, and not.

Not only that, had this job changed my life.

And you asked Shelly, it's changed the life of women and youth and men around the world.

It's just.

It's.

It's.

It's blown way, way big.

It's.

It's absolutely mind blowing.

But I still, I understand that love is.

Is the key.

It is.

That's amazing.

Now, was that her brain telling her this, or was that maybe some message from a higher power?

I mean, all of that's pretty amazing.

Maybe it's all of the above.

I mean, you know, we are, I, I cannot emphasize this enough.

We're so much more than we think ourselves to be on a typical day to day basis.

And yet when we go into the dream place, you know, all of those I talked about the executive network and all these different centers in our brain that are the quick judges and critics and things like that, those are literally taken offline when we're asleep.

And so we're able to access a much, much bigger part of ourself, memories and understandings about ourselves.

And perhaps we're accessing something else even greater and beyond ourself.

It's both.

Wow.

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Welcome back to Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Tucaro.

We've been exploring a pretty amazing idea that the answers we're searching for might already be waiting for us each night when we close our eyes.

Dreams aren't just random flashes.

They can actually guide us.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner is helping us understand how.

She's a creative dreamwork expert, founder of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery, and the author of the Secret Mind Unlock the power of dreams to transform your life.

Her work blends neurobiology and social psychology to show how our secret mind helps us solve problems, finish emotional business, and tap into our highest potential.

Let's get back into how those dreams carry powerful messages that we're meant to hear.

Bonnie, I know in your book you have seven kinds of the repetitive nightmare, busy dream, clear dream, great dream, light dream, and dreams of union.

I was wondering if you wanted to maybe kind of briefly describe those because we do have different types of dreams.

Nightmares are really problematic for sure.

Actually, nightmares are a friend and I'll tell you why.

Okay.

So typically a nightmare is short and it's an acute emotion.

It's either, you know, anger or fear.

And we wake up and we're trembling or heart is racing.

And for many people, that is the dream that they remember.

Not everybody is a prolific dreamer like Kathy is.

And although we all can be, it's about deciding our dreams are important.

And Kathy has a Long practice.

You've been writing your dreams, Kathy, for a really long time, and so you've developed that.

But for many people, that it's a nightmare that really wakes them up to paying attention to their dream.

All of us dream and all of us dream every night.

It's really a question of recall.

And that recall is, is usually, do we write it down or not?

But with a nightmare, we're.

We're going to recall it because it's so scary or it's so intense.

So I call nightmares our friends, because they do wake us up and wake us up to some kind of emotional knot, let's say that we need to untangle in our life.

And if we get that message and we deal with it, it untangles.

But we don't always do that.

And then it might repeat.

That's a repetitive nightmare.

And then maybe we still aren't paying attention and we might do what I call the piling on of things, of adding other emotions.

I can't do this.

I'm not, you know, it's too hard for me to make change or whatever it is.

And that becomes a busy dream.

If we kind of wade through all of that, and really our dreams do change when we kind of roll up our sleeves and start to get in there and pay attention to them and work with them and see them as a real dialog happening inside of ourself, then we have a clear dream.

And a clear dream is going to show us both block, but also potential and how to get over that block.

So clear dreams are kind of, you know, helping us to.

They're.

They're the ones that people tell as a story, as kind of a beginning, middle and end.

Something happens.

It makes sense.

It seems kind of like a movie.

There's everyday colors and it's giving us an opportunity to see, okay, here's some patterns or belief systems, but here's some parts of yourself you can access to really kind of get over that and come to a new place.

So those are the first four kinds of dreams.

And then after that, we have the dreams that are the really big experiences that evoke awe or wonder or even maybe have a message in our life.

The great dreams of our life and those also, you know, we have awe and wonder in our everyday, but we tend to kind of blow past that in our busy lives.

But if we stop and we pay attention, there's moments of great love, as Kathy discovered, or uplift that really move us to a much bigger place within ourself.

And so we also have Dreams of that nature.

Wow.

There's so much that goes on in our minds and if we listen to it and consciously, maybe what, write it down on a notepad.

When we wake up, we could have a lot of insight into changing things.

I know your book talks about that.

Tackling the unresolved, looking beyond the dreams for a deeper meaning.

All of that and conquering blocks.

There's so many things you can do.

With dreams when you're in it and you're not happy if you, you can actually physically change it.

I've actually done that not very many times, but yeah, I have or I believe it.

You're pretty headstrong.

You're like, wait a minute, I don't like that, I gotta fix this.

Right?

Or I've awakened and gone back to the dream because I liked it.

You know, it's kind of weird.

Let's see.

That's fantastic.

Because that's really when we start to really to have agency in changing our waking life.

When we wake up in a dream and we realize, I'm dreaming, I can do anything, I can shift this, I can change this.

Then we know I can do this in waking time as well.

And that's where dreams really shift our mindset or our cognitive map of what's possible for ourself.

There's a lot of power there.

There is.

And it really proves, you know, I've heard the stat that we use 10% of our brain when we're awake.

I, I think that there's a whole lot more in, in that gray matter than we even have any clue about.

And dreams, I wonder if that accounts for some of that.

Well, I would think yes.

But also, even, you know, more outside of that.

I keep coming back to this body mind thing and you know how much more they're finding.

They're calling our gut our second brain.

There are aspects of our body that know things as well.

That's not just, not just our brain, it's, it's our whole full bodied experience of, of living.

Well, yeah, when you think about it, you can get a sense.

You walk into a room and you just get a bad feeling or yeah, you meet somebody and they really give you the heebie jeebies and the hair on the back of your neck stands up.

There's something your body is sensing.

Exactly.

And one of the great things about dreaming is it helps us to develop that.

And you know, one of the things that I, I do frequently is I just normalize these things and things like intuition for people because I work with a Lot of executives and people who have these gut feelings and they may say things to me like, I just knew that wasn't the right hire.

They were great, the team loved them, but I could feel in my gut they weren't the right one.

And modern science wants to often poo poo, that kind of thing.

But in fact it's very real and it's something that we can put stock in when we learn how our body is talking to us and we learn to discern the difference between those intuitive moments and moments of just.

I'm anxious about making this decision or something like that.

And that is one of the things that I. I talk about in the Secret Mind is little practices you can do to get really clear on those differences for yourself so that you can come to depend on your intuition.

So our dreams open that up, you.

Think, oh, for sure they open that up.

I was going to say, I think so.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Dreams have I.

Honest to God, they have guided me so much.

Like I knew I would know ahead of time when things.

When I was coming up on a hurdle because in my dreams I'd be surrounded by five or six tornadoes or I'd be falling, I'd be in mud stuck up to my neck, right?

And I can't move, you know, or here, here's one dream that really help me.

I was being chased by my crazy ex and he had this big butcher knife.

He was trying to kill me.

And I'm in snow and I'm like, it's really.

I'm up to my waist and snow and so it's really hard to run.

And there's this pickup truck, brand new, and it's just sitting there in the snow running.

I'm like, oh, great.

So I jump in the truck.

And the truck had an energy around it, so my crazy ex couldn't come near it.

He would burn.

So he's standing there unable to get to me.

So now I'm thinking, okay, well, now, okay.

So I look before I even grab the steering wheel, I look out the windshield and there's a very, very steep incline.

It's sheer ice and admits the road.

There's all these big icicles like, like roadblocks but make chunks of ice, right?

And I'm still, I'm still not touching the steering wheel.

And I'm looking at all these obstacles on this very icy hill.

And I'm like, oh God, I left one one hell to go to another right.

I'm like, oh, how am I going to get up there now?

Well, the Truck started moving by itself and it started to kind of make its way all the way.

It was avoiding the big, the obstacles and driving itself.

But I didn't have faith in the truck.

I panicked.

So I grabbed the steering wheel and as soon as I grabbed the wheel, the truck slid all the way back down.

And I'm like, oh, man.

So then I let go of the wheel and the truck starts driving itself again and it's avoiding all the, all the obstacles.

And I made it all the way almost to the top.

And before I start to panic and I lose faith, I grab the wheel again to try and take control.

What do I do?

The truck goes all the way back down.

Third time I get the message.

I'm like, all right, Kathy, let Jesus take the wheel, will you?

There you go.

And I let the truck guide itself and it made all the way to the top.

And then once I got to the top, there was like a five lane highway, just like the 405 in, in LA which cram packed with cars.

But the truck steered itself, guided itself through and I didn't touch the wheel.

So basically the whole, whole point of the dream was let Jesus take the wheel, right?

Let, let.

Every time you try and control it, you're losing your power.

So just give, have faith and it'll be okay.

It'll, it'll steer you in the right direction, literally.

Those are some powerful messages you kept.

Yeah, they are.

You know, I also have had a dream before that a tornado came and split between me and a business partner at the time.

And I woke up and I knew, you know, in a very simple sense, a storm is coming.

And one of the opportunities that dreams present for us is when we wake up and we have that sort of inner knowing like that, and we understand the dream in that way.

It, it opens us up to a different kind of dialogue with our waking time than if we had just, you know, kept barreling along with things status quo.

So in other words, it presents an opportunity to see those first signs of a storm brewing and talk to the business partner and work through conflict and resolve things, sort of defusing the tornado, if you will.

So there's a lot of different ways that dreams can speak to us and help inform our waking time and how we want to then approach the challenges that we encounter in our waking time.

Stay tuned for more of women road warriors.

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Welcome back to Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Tucaro.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner, the woman who spent her life decoding the movies your brain plays while you sleep, is the creative dreamwork expert who founded the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery.

She's written the Secret Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform youm Life to Prove youe Secret Mind Isn't messing around at 3am it's handing you seven different kinds of dreams to fix what's broken, finish old feelings, and light up the best version of you.

Bonnie's been giving us tremendous insight into what our dreams truly mean and what they could do for us.

Bonnie, you have all kinds of insight to share with people in your book where I really think that this can empower them to change their lives, strengthen the muscle for remembering and understanding your dreams.

They can get that out of the book.

Identify patterns and unresolved issues in the dreams and then you have a waking dream method to re enter dreams to address unfinished business in your waking life.

I mean, I find that fascinating too.

How does that work?

Well, you know, dreams are giving us messages and if it's a dream that is unresolved, as a sort of like rule of thumb, our dreams are asking us to respond in some way either to resolve a conflict.

For example, the tornado dream I gave that was splitting me and my business partner doesn't have to split.

In other words, I may see that a storm is brewing and I see that the potential is if I do nothing, if I don't intervene at all, it might split up me and a business partner.

But if I can see, you know, a tornado doesn't happen, all of a sudden clouds start building on the horizon.

And so by waking up and having that in my mind, the first clouds that started building offers a chance to dialogue with that person in waking time, to look at it as kind of a, you know, heads up this might happen.

And when it does, deal with it.

Don't wait until it becomes a storm.

So that's one way we can look at how dreams inform our waking time.

But another one, and really specifically the waking dream exercise that you mentioned, is if we go back into the dream itself.

There's so many dreams that are asking us to go back in and just address the, what I call the necessity of that dream and to give a Very simple, simple example, because so many people have this kind of dream, is the full toilet that needs to be flushed.

That is a common dream.

And when it comes to the bathroom.

I always have the.

Maybe it's because I have to go to the bathroom during the night or something.

I'm in a bathroom and I can't unzip my pants.

Yeah.

What a panic.

We can take that example.

You can just close your eyes, go back into the dream and unzip them.

When we pair our consciousness, our waking, conscious mind with the dream we're coming back into putting, you know, bridging our, if you want to use these terms, our subconscious and our conscious, and that's when we can really make change.

So with a full toilet dream, for anybody out there who has that dream, because I do get that a lot from people, it's just close your eyes, go back in and flush it, and feel the difference.

It.

It's a physical difference between that thing that is about to overflow and needs taken care of and the relief that happens when it's out and gone.

Interesting.

So it changes our perspective.

Would you say that that's a lot of it.

We can actually maybe exercise some control with some of these metaphorical examples that our brain's giving us in dreams.

Yeah, it changes our perspective, but also it's more than metaphor.

It's an actual physical experience.

So from cognitive and neuropsychology, image is our blueprint for action.

And to say that really simply, I am not going to be able to make a cup of tea for myself unless I have an image of making a cup of tea.

It's not a thought.

It starts as an image, and then I attach thought to it.

Oh, yeah, I should go make a cup of tea.

So image is the basis of all movement and action.

And we form images all the time based on what we're experiencing.

So if I have an energetic block in me, it's going to be an image.

It's going to be any number of things.

I've had people who see themselves as, you know, in front of a tornado, for example, from Kathy's dream.

I've had people see a lion in a cage.

Any number of images that speak to that dreamer as what the physical bodily experience is.

And we do speak in terms of metaphors.

We say all the time things like, I'm so trapped at work, or I feel like I'm imprisoned in my job.

What we're doing is we're putting vocabulary to the images that are already inside of ourselves.

So we have the image.

And then we verbally explain that image to other people, even if we're not aware of that image in our conscious mind, it's in there.

It's the basis of thought.

Interesting.

So when we have a dream or we go in as an imagery exercise to address a necessity in a dream, we're literally shifting the image at the basis of thought and action.

So we're shifting our.

Not just our perspective, but what is truly possible for us to do next.

That's empowering.

It is.

Yeah, it is.

Wow.

I wanted to digress for just a moment.

You're talking about image.

People who are not sighted dream also.

And they have images, don't they?

Absolutely.

I've had clients who are not sighted.

That's a really good question, Shelly.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah.

So the brain has images even if they've never seen things.

Yeah, they do.

And in my work with clients who are not sighted, they also speak to me in terms of colors, temperatures, there's all kinds of inner experiences that they have.

And Jacques Lucerin also speaks about in his book.

He was a member of the French Resistance as a teenager, and he speaks about.

In his autobiography, or he spoke about having his, you know, sort of team bring to him someone to run one of the regions.

And they were very high on this person.

And he wasn't, he said, because he saw a black diagonal across his visual screen.

But because of pressure, he agreed to bring that person in, and that person did end up turning them in and betrayed them all.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Our inside knows.

Interesting.

I mean, you just need to listen and observe and follow, which a lot of people don't always do.

Your book is so insightful, Bonnie.

Where can people find it?

Thank you so much.

You can find the book on Amazon.

You can find it at Barnes and Noble, and it's the Secret Mind.

You can follow me, follow my newsletter for different speaking events.

You can sign up for that@bonnie buckner.com.

Yeah, I think people will be surprised with themselves once they read your book.

That's the thing.

There's so much more inside of ourselves to discover, and what a wonderful discovery that is.

We're constantly changing and evolving, and it can be a whole great life adventure.

I agree.

Well, I think children are more in touch with it.

They know that there's a lot more to us than adults do, because I think we shut a lot of it down.

And this book, I think, is a reawakening for a lot of people.

It is.

And, you know, I run an institute, the Institute for Dreaming and imagery where we teach classes to people and train people in this work.

And we also have a young Dreamers program.

And children are fantastic, fantastic because they also move through situations super quickly because they're already in that dream space.

And so they don't get bogged down as adults do in thinking about, but why did this happen?

They don't care.

They're all about action.

If they dream the house is on fire, then they just get out and that's it.

And they don't really think about it any further.

It's, it's, it's wonderful.

How do people reach out to your institute?

So you can send an email to Info Institute for dreaming and imagery.com you can just go to Institute for dreaming and imagery dot com.

You'll find all of our classes and, and how to get in touch with us to do one on one work and can send us an email that way.

Excellent.

We could talk to you for another couple hours.

Bonnie, this is really.

Yeah.

Very insightful.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And thank you, Kathy, for saying all your different dreams.

That was really interesting.

Gosh, that's not even a 1% of the amount of dreams that I have.

Thank you, Bonnie, for being on the show.

I think that the listeners are going to get a lot of education when they pick up your book and read it.

Thanks so much.

Thank you two for having me.

Really.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

It's been wonderful.

You're very welcome, Bonnie.

We hope you've enjoyed this latest episode.

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You've been listening to Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Takaro.

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