Podcast Episode 70: Bonnie Buckner

Alison : Hello.

Jean : Hi, there.

Alison : Okay. I’m sleeping. Why do you think I’m sleeping?

Jean : Because you’re having a dream.

Alison : That’s right, that’s exactly right. That is exactly right. Because we’re talking to a woman, a dream expert. But, like, more than an expert, like she’s..

Jean : Dedicated her life to um, to getting it out there, that our dreams are very powerful.

Alison : That’s right.

Jean : And very helpful.

Alison : That’s right. Right, right. Perfect. She wrote the book called, The Secret Mind — Unlock the Power of Your Dreams To Transform Your Life.

Jean : And we’re talking to Bonnie Buckner, who is also the creator of the,  International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery.

Alison : That’s right, that’s right. So you and I were just talking about dreams. How we never really thought about them. Like it was like, oh,  a dream…yeah..that was a thinkg, right?

Alison :  but then you were talking about, um, dreams that you might have had about about Alex.

Jean : Oh, yeah.

Alison : Right.  And that that some of them felt different.

Jean : Yeah. Some of them feel like I had a knowing that his soul, if you will, was really communicating with me like, oh, I had a a deep encounter with him versus just, oh, there was just a fleeting moment of him.

Alison : Right, right.

Jean : I either had like a knowing like, oh, he he visited me.

Alison : Hmm.

Jean : Versus just like an image of him.

Alison : I love that.

Jean : Yeah.

Alison : Because, you know.

Jean : And I don’t get that a lot.

Alison : You don’t?

Jean : I wish I got it more, but I don’t.

Alison : Alex, are you listening? That’s right. Because Jean’s talking to you. I think it was just like like reading the book and beginning to think about dreams. I really want to remember my dreams more because I don’t right now, like I started to with this book, but I really think I want to, i want to remember them because I think they’re kind of fun because they’re so thick… My dreams are lots going on.

Jean : Well, she definitely says you can remember your dreams. It’s like a muscle. It’s a skill, right? And she she teaches how to remember your dreams, how to interpret them, understand them, and then to, and then it’s your responsibility to act on them.

Alison : Right.

Jean : Yeah.

Alison : I can’t wait to talk to her.

Jean : I know.

Alison : I’m very excited. All right, here she is. Here’s Bonnie.

Jean : It’s wonderful to see your face in person. And thank you for writing such a, ” wow” book.

Alison : Yeah.

Bonnie : Thank you.

Jean : Really, really opened up my my knowingness of of dreams. I had no idea the power behind my dreams.

Bonnie : Oh, yeah!

Alison : Yeah. It’s amazing. We we we loved it. So we’re just going to dive right in. How did you get interested in all this? Dreams. And it’s just like, it’s amazing and it’s so in depth, your book. How did how did this begin for you?

Bonnie : Well, I, um, it came from a dream. When I was three years old. I had had nightmares and nightmares and nightmares, and I, um, was really troubled by it. I was scared of them. Right? And I had a moment one day where I was sitting outside in the morning on our front porch steps, and I started thinking, you know, maybe I can just never sleep. And then, you know, I’m a three year old kid. So I’m thinking, what’s the Guinness Book of World Records– never going to sleep,Right? And then I kind of just kept thinking through that and realizing, you know, I have to sleep. And it just kind of hit me, oh, that’s why I’m on this planet. I’m going to learn how to master my dreams and teach that to others. And, you know, it’s not something that I like really focused on. It was kind of in the back of my head, and I kept going through life. And I want to say this, this is really important to all those parents out there, who are your listeners– um, one thing that was really great is that my family supported me saying things like that. So they talked about dreams with me and talked about these kinds of things. And then when I was in junior high, one of my, one of the librarians handed me a book on dreams. And I just kept having these little tastes, these little moments going along until I found the dreaming lineage or tradition that really spoke to me as an adult.

Alison : Wow. That’s amazing. Three years old.

Bonnie : I think kids know things when they’re really young. Yeah, and then it gets kind of put aside or buried or, you know.

Alison : Right, I agree. So can you tell us, because we were just talking about this while we while we were on, what is a dream?

Bonnie : Oh, that’s a great question. Um, I want to know what you guys think is a dream? Because when we did finally get on and the zoom clicked in, you said, well, this was a dream… So what is a dream?

Alison : I kind of think. I kind of think everything’s a dream.

Bonnie : Yes

Alison : I kind of think everything’s an illusion and a perception. And I believe that …like When I was reading your book, I was thinking that you were able to tap into a greater level of thinking or a general, uh, a general consciousness. Um, I have never thought about dreams the way you explained them. And that’s what we were just talking about, that for us, it was like dreams were- oh, um, and like an afterthought or your brain trying to work something out. And then we were talking about A Christmas Carol, where he says, you’re just a piece of undigested potato.

Bonnie : Yeah.

Alison : Um, but. So that’s kind of what I thought. But, but but your book brings up such specific seven types of dreams. The the location, that principle, I , all these things that were like, wow, I, I never realized that. So I don’t know.  What do you think a dream is?

Bonnie : Well, let’s think of. Let’s back up just a little bit. We are in a body, and a body is form. And we look out into the world and we see forms. We see trees outside the window. We see this microphone. Everything that we feel we can really grasp is a form, but we also experience a lot of other things that don’t have that are invisible to the naked eye. We experience things like, um, right now I can feel this room is a little hot, it’s a little stuffy. I’m not seeing that. I’m feeling that, right? Then there’s even more ephemeral sort of things, like feeling like I’m in love or feeling like I’m in awe.. you know, try to explain that to somebody. Um, we lack vocabulary and visual reference for a huge amount of things that we experience in our lives. So, dreaming is all the time I’m going to pick up on perception, not illusion. I’ll be specific about that in the words, because for me it’s very, very real. It’s our body’s response to what we perceive. So I’m perceiving something, but on my inside I’m having some kind of response to it. I’m having an emotional response, or I’m just having a basic response. I like that, I don’t like that. How do I know what I feel? How do I know who I am? How do I know what decision I want to take? So our inside gives us a language of images. It puts into form the things that don’t have form so that we can look at it, make sense of it, and then respond to it.

Alison : Mhm.

Jean : Yeah.

Jean : Wow.

Bonnie : Yes.

Jean : Honestly. Bonnie.

Alison : Yeah.

Jean : Like the name of your book, the title of your book, The Secret Mind. I think that is so apropos because it, it is this untapped wealth of wisdom and guidance that, that most of us haven’t been privy to. It’s just, oh, it’s a dream. You had a bad dream. Oh, you know, don’t worry about it. Or whatever our parents did to navigate… And you are opening up a whole new way to receive support from the universe, from God, from your higher self.

Bonnie : Absolutely. You know, we get we. Life requires us to, um, learn the culture we’re living in, whether it’s our family culture. It’s our, you know, growing up in Texas, like I did culture, if we moved to a new culture, we have to kind of figure out what’s the sort of, you know, guardrails of how people conduct themselves in these places. Those guardrails can be, um, useful because that’s how we exchange. It’s part of our social contract that we make with others and how we sort of go about our day. But they can also be, um, small and rigid. And so as we start to, you know, grow up and start to say things. And that’s why I mentioned parents earlier, I would say, I’m going to teach people how to work with their dreams. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Texas. I mean, nowhere is a teeny tiny town in the Texas Panhandle. And yet my parents had the wherewithal to say, great. Yeah. Not every parent does that. Not every school teacher does that. And so we start to set things aside in ourselves to poo poo, you know, things that we’re feeling and we start conforming and we miss these other parts of ourselves. And that’s why, um, when we dream and most of our dreams, we have a lot of different things. We have characters, objects, scenarios, because those are all aspects of ourself that we haven’t been paying attention to. And then there’s just the plain old busy. We are busy and modern society is just moving at a pace that honestly, none of us can keep up with. And that pace requires us to just be always looking out and checking off and doing. And to really know ourselves, we have to stop and look inside and get really quiet. And so all these factors kind of keep us from that wisdom. As you’re talking about the part of me, that already knows what’s best for me. Mhm.

Alison : Yes. That’s so that’s so true. Uh, just for our listeners sake, I want, I would like to describe that almond dream.

Bonnie : Mhm. Okay.

Alison : So there’s um a dream that you reference in the book about a person that was trying to decide between jobs. Right. And they had a, was it a, it was, was it a dream, Dream or was it a waking dream in your office?

Bonnie : I did a waking dream.

Alison : A waking dream. And in the waking dream, uh, there is, um, a box and then a tree with, with, i think it’s a golden almond or.

Bonnie : One golden almond. Yeah.

Alison : And immediately, um, upon that you in this client were able to realize, I guess, after talking about what the box was and was, I think it was a cardboard box or something, and what this meant, and it meant that the person should take neither job and start on their own, once they got through this block. So the necessity of the dream means getting through, getting past this block. I thought about that dream so much because, how much is that, how much did you and the client know that it meant, hey, try another, try something different on your own? How how did that connection come up?

Bonnie : Yeah. So here’s what’s so great about dreams? Really.. All of us know what we really want to do. The big plaguing question is, why we’re not doing it? And all of these reasons we’ve been talking about are reasons that we sort of stick that in the bottom drawer. Way back. So in that scenario, this client had given me, you know, a very long really talked to me for like 45 minutes about the pros and cons of each of these two jobs. Like just spinning in circles, you know, because they were both great and they were both great offers. And so we did this little imagery exercise. And the first thing that she says to me, oh, I see this almond tree with this golden almond. I don’t want to take either of those jobs and then start spilling out all the things she had already been thinking through of starting her own practice. So it wasn’t even that… She just started thinking about it in that second. She had already driven the neighborhood and found a for lease sign, but it was locked away. That’s why, “unlock” is in the the title of the book as well. It had been locked away by her own lock and key, mind you. She knew what she really wanted to do, but she stuffed it away and was in that sort of logical thinking. You know what is going to be better? Because it’s a risk. But life wants us to take little risks. And that risk being what I really want to do with my life. So I didn’t do really anything. I gave a little exercise to help her get back to that dreaming place. And then, when she said, but there’s a block, there’s this, you know, cardboard box in the way, then I could help her a little bit. We’ll get over it. Help find a way over, under, through, around. And then that’s when she said, well, it’s just cardboard because it’s always just cardboard. It’s rarely super difficult. It’s just getting ourselves replugged in to the emotional, exciting tenor of what we really want to do.

Alison : I love that.

Jean : I do too. You know, when when I think of dreams, Bonnie, it’s really– dreams for dummies. Very, very basic. Like, oh, I had I think I remember I was driving a truck and I went over a mountain. Right. Let’s say I say something like that, now, for you hearing me say that, is that going to be the same interpretation that Allison would have? Like, is a truck the same for Jean, for Bonnie, for, you know, is there a different definition or symbol or image?

Bonnie : Everybody makes their own image vocabulary. I’m really glad you brought that up because people ask me, um, you know, I looked I had this dream and I went online, I googled it, and I, I immediately I’m just like, oh, no, I know something bad is about to come out. And what they say is I read these things about, you know, symbols and it’s not me ,that’s not you know what I think this dream is about.. So over Memorial weekend, I was in, um, visiting a friend in upstate New York, and we went to Niagara Falls. I’ve never been there. And she is a practitioner at the institute that I run for dreaming. And we were with a second practitioner. So there were three dreamers of us looking at Niagara Falls. And one of the groundskeepers there had found a little snake, and he was holding the snake, and all these little kids gathered around him, and they wanted to see the snake. And we got talking. You know, snakes are a great example of that because there’s a lot of different meanings that snakes can have and the experience each one of us has with a snake. And then the context in which that snake appears in a dream is determinant of what that means. So like those kids were super excited about the snake and they wanted to touch it and all of these things. Now, I grew up in Texas and we had poisonous rattlesnakes. So my sort of initial moment is, okay, wait, what kind of snake are we looking at here? You know? Total different universe that we’re coming from and that’s going to show up in our dreams.

Alison : And that’s interesting because I said to my husband, hey, I’m talking to a dream expert. What would you like to ask? And his thing was like, what’s an empty house mean?  and I said no, no, no. I said that I think that’s all for. He said, no, no, no ask, ask. And it’s funny because it’s not… There isn’t a thing.

Bonnie : There isn’t a thing.

Jean : There isn’t a code book.

Bonnie : That’s what gives us our power.

Alison : Right.

Bonnie : Because it’s my thing and it’s what I’m coming into with it. And if I’m looking, if I’m googling, what does this mean? I’m asking someone on the outside to tell me what my interior life is. Yeah, but if I take the time to get to know my interior life, then I have agency. And I do for myself, right?

Alison : That’s exactly, exactly right. Um, can you tell me you talk about seven different types of dreams, and they range like nightmare to great dream to, you know, clear dream. And then you talk about, um, the busy dream.

Bonnie : Yeah.

Alison : And it’s and and I that’s what I feel like I have all the time. When you said busy dream,  i’m like, check… that’s me. I think you say that that is is is is is an outgrowth of an unresolved problem or nightmare… Is that am I understanding that correctly?

Bonnie : Yeah. So let’s look at it this way. First of all nightmare I mean that’s the most common thing. And everybody who pretty much anywhere says, oh yeah, I’ve had a nightmare. Okay. We remember that for a reason. It scares us. And so, counterintuitively, nightmares are really great friends because they literally are trying to wake us up to something to a block. Okay, there’s a nightmare. I wake up, I deal with it. I don’t have it again, but maybe I don’t. Maybe it goes back to what Jean was saying earlier, just kind of pushing it away. And then it comes back. You know, people tell me sometimes I keep having this, you know, one dream, right? Maybe we even push that away. At that point, things start to pile up. And that’s really what a busy dream is, is the pile up? Sometimes I refer to it like, you know, if you come home, you leave your socks in the middle of the floor. One set of socks is not really a problem. You could clean it up, but then day after day for leaving socks, it’s starting to be like, oh, there’s a pile of things. But then some friends are going to come over. Instead of dealing with the socks, we just pull a carpet over it, pretend it’s not even there. Right? But then at some point, we’re going to forget that it’s about socks and we’re going to start to deal with this carpet. Why does this carpet have a lump in the middle of it? And then we are so off track at that point because we’re looking at the wrong thing. We have to dig back in.

Alison : Right. So that’s and that interested me because I don’t remember a nightmare that would have instigated busy dreams. So how could somebody. Because I talked to a lot of people and they’re like, oh yeah, I’m rushing around. I’m doing stuff. I’m there’s a million people. They’re all busy. Um, what can I do? Or what can I tell someone else to do to get back to the nightmare? How do I ask myself that at night? Or, like, how do I wait?

Bonnie : Hang on.

Alison : Okay.

Bonnie : Because I’m going to move you in a different direction… not to get back to the nightmare, but let’s go towards coherence here. Okay. Um, I will say this. This is a caveat because a lot of people say to me at the beginning, oh, I’m only having busy dreams. But in fact, they’re not, often. Often they’re clear dreams, but there’s, you know, at the beginning when you don’t know how to draw the lines, you know, connect the dots, it just seems like there’s all these crazy things going on. But when you start to work with them, then you start to realize this makes sense. Like these go together, these vignettes. So it’s kind of more, maybe an easier way to start to wrap your hands around it is color. So a clear dream is going to have everyday colors and maybe one sort of bright spot like the pool had really turquoise water, you know, that’s kind of a a clear dream. But a busy dream is like it’s more murky, like Sienna colors. Like it doesn’t quite get anywhere.

Alison : Right.

Bonnie : And that can happen too. I need to say, when we’re super tired, when we’re, you know, it doesn’t have to follow that linear progression, exactly, from nightmare to busy dream. The nightmare might be in my waking time. I’m just burning the candle at both ends. You know, things like this.

Jean : Yeah.

Alison : Colors. I forgot that. You’re right. You say that.

Bonnie : I’m not testing y’all. But I do appreciate that you read the book.

Alison : You said it, though… I’m, you know….

Jean : Okay, so if I’m a new person, that’s that’s hearing this, this interview, and I go, wow, I, I want to start tapping into my dreams like a newbie. And I have my yellow legal pad next to my bed. You take it from there, Bonnie, what what do you suggest this person do to start working with their dreams?

Bonnie : Do you have a yellow legal pad? Is that how you’re doing it?

Jean : No, I don’t, I don’t,  for me, i lay in bed before I go to bed at night and I’ll… because of reading your book, I’ll go, you know, please show me right now, i say show me what I need to know?

Bonnie : Okay.

Jean : Help me to remember my dream.

Bonnie : But what do you put it in?

Jean : In my head.

Bonnie : Okay. That’s the, that’s the problem.

Jean : Okay.

Bonnie : So yellow legal pad is fine. That’s a step up from the head. But, um, intention is key. Any sleep study, any neuroscientist will tell you a little bit of intention, kick starts dream recall. So if you go out and find a pretty journal, a little step up from the legal pad, something’s pretty and you’re kind of excited about it. You know, journals are kind of fun. You’re going to put things in it. That’s a great way to start. And so write the date on the first page and your sentence like the sentence that you said. Or tonight I’ll have a dream and remember whatever sentence you want. And then put the pin there and write it down. One of the things I would love to do is like hover over people when they’re about to get out of bed and push them back in and say, wait, because we tend to jump out of bed and like, go, go go go go. If we just stay there quietly, so many more things, just even five minutes will come back that, and especially if you start writing in your dream journal feeling– snippets of songs, all of these things are part of that dream experience emotions and then just sit with that and have a question about it. I was having a conversation with a guy yesterday about this, actually, and he was like, I just get out of bed and go. And I said, but what if you just laid there a little longer? And the more we talked, he was like, yeah, because actually, if I need to think and have a good idea, it’s normally in the shower, you know, when I’m relaxed and I’m not really thinking. I said, well, that part of your brain, the default mode is what’s operating in that sleepy time, mind wandering time when you’re waking up. And it’s so fruitful and it’s so good for us and so creative. So just sitting in that space a little bit relaxing, not grabbing the phone and just thinking like, why am I waking up with this, this snippet of all the songs I know? What’s this snippet about? And follow the association, because it’s probably going to associate you to something. Oh yeah, that happened yesterday or that happened last week, and just follow it and see what opens up.

Alison : Yeah, that’s that’s that’s great. Beautiful. And you also can you also talk to the listeners, um, about the connection between dreams and imagination and creativity, because I find that I found in your book that keeping referencing those was very inspiring to me.

Bonnie : Mhm. Well, it’s inspiring to me too. And it’s needed. I mean, I really am kind of on a mission to get people to really get back into their dreaming, to source that infinite place of creativity that all of us have, because we all have it and we use it every single day, and we don’t think about it because we’ve created this sort of idea of like, well, I’m not Mozart or I’m not, you know, Picasso. But Ruth Richards is a creativity researcher and she talks about everyday creativity. Think about the ingenuity that it takes to think about how do I start a podcast? How do I pay my bills? You know, we we are creating all the time and we’re creating without even knowing it. We’re creating relationships. We’re creating communities. So the part of our brain that is responsible for dreaming the default network, is also the part that is responsible for our imagination. It’s the part of our brain that, um, has all of these experiences, memories, associations, inner knowings. How do I know what I know? It’s all kind of stored in there. And the default network takes that to imagine new things with it. I’ve been doing this up to this moment in my life, now let’s imagine somewhere else.

Bonnie : It’s also responsible for, I call it social cognition. It’s it’s that grab bag of things, of empathy, and how do I know that what I said, you guys understood? Or maybe did I upset somebody? Or we have to imagine, like, really put ourselves in other people’s shoes to know that. And so dreaming is all part of that same network of, um, that neural processing network. And the more we dream, I believe, the more creative, because we’re spending time there. And that’s kind of on the radar right now of, of neuroscience research, because the other major neural processing network is the executive network, and that’s the one. We just use it all the time. Every time we pick up the phone, we’re using it every time we do, you know, two plus two equals that kind of cognitive, goal driven thinking. But the two are supposed to talk to each other, and that’s called functional connectivity. And the more we are just pounding technology and pounding these goal directed things, the less they’re cross talking, and that’s a problem, you know, if we can’t imagine new ways of being, new ways of creating societies, governments, etc., then we’re just going to repeat the same thing ad infinitum.

Alison : I think what you’re saying is so important right now, especially with AI.

Jean : I was just going to say that.

Alison : I heard you.

Jean : I was so thinking that.

Alison : Because right now so many people I know say, oh, I like they, they write a, um, a promo for a podcast. And they didn’t even write it.

Bonnie : Yeah.

Alison : I it’s just and and like, there’s part of the, I think part of the good stuff about writing it yourself is the frustration and making it better. You know, personally, I kind of like the oh, that’s not really– like I like that part of the creative process. So I think what you’re saying is so crucial right now. And when you say you’re on a mission, can you just go flesh that out a little bit for us? Like, how are you? How is that showing up for you? Your mission.

Bonnie : Well, one of the dreams that I mentioned in the book is the Johnny Appleseed of Dreams, um, which was a dream of mine, of really sort of getting seeing myself as kind of Johnny Appleseed and understanding that it’s about planting, you know, dreams in places, meaning teaching people how to work with dreams and training people to work with dreams. So they teach more people to work with dreams. Um, I bring dreaming work into, um, some unexpected places. Let’s say through the institute, um, we provide programming at the George Washington University, um, center for Excellence in Public Leadership’s coaching programs, the eco coaching program. And we use that as a means of training people to learn to look inside themselves. And coaching is a really great place to bring in dreaming because we think of coaching as goals. I want to change my job, so get me from A to B, that’s what people bring to a coach, or I need to learn how to do XYZ and coaches often, then just pick that up and run with it. But none of us make decisions that um, That don’t come from an emotional place. In one way or another, you know, and from a very simple thing of just I really feel this, and so then we really go for it. And so when we’re talking about coaching, for example, go back to the Almond dream. Am I going to coach somebody on that pros and cons list, like that woman brought to me, if so, she’s going to take one of those two jobs and that’s another five years that her real dream inside gets buried. But if I can plug in to the real emotion of what she really wants to do, and that’s why she couldn’t take that decision because there was no emotional connection there. If I can get to that place, then people can just move and move so fast. That woman’s a perfect example. She wrote me an email three months later and said she was on track to earn more that year than what either one of those two jobs would have brought in. And it’s because she was motivated and enthusiastic. So when I say I’m on a mission, I just I’m stomping around in as many places as I can. That will open the door to me to talk about this, to get people to just very simply just start writing your dreams– just that, because it’s your way in to know more about yourself.

Alison : Yeah. That’s great.

Jean : It really is wonderful. So, so can people just go to your website and you offer a whole bunch of different classes and courses on.

Bonnie : yeah. So anybody can come to the website. We have classes year round. Um, you can find some of the practitioners, myself included. We do one on one sessions with people. If people want to have, you know, that individual work. Um, we also, a lot of organizations come to us and ask us to put together, um, programs for them. And these can be extensive programs. They can be smaller programs. You know, we’ve had just groups of people say, hey, I’ve got I did this a couple of weekends ago. I’ve got ten of my friends. Can you just teach us dreaming just to get us going a little bit? Yes. So, yeah.

Jean : Bonnie, can you dream for someone else?

Bonnie : What do you mean for?

Jean : Let’s say, like Allison here says to me, you know, I I’ve just been, like, really busy lately. Can can you see if you get any insight from my from my dog, like how my dog is doing, you know, can can.

Bonnie : You mean like a sort of clairvoyant reading.

Jean : Yeah.

Bonnie : I mean, we do have intuitive dreams and intuition. Just when we’re awake and premonitory dreams. Yeah. Um, and if you think about it, we’re all connected. We’re all…

Jean : That’s why I ask, like…

Bonnie : Yeah, yeah. Um. And I frequently, uh, especially around if I have clients who are trying to get pregnant, I very frequently will dream when they get pregnant.

Jean : You do?

Bonnie : Um, I do, but I don’t say that to them. It’s their journey to get pregnant. Um, it would be out of my out of step for me to say, hey, this is going to be a great day. I just dreamed that you got pregnant. I wait, they can come to me and say, I finally did it, we’re pregnant. And then I can say, yeah, I had a dream that kind of made me feel that was going to be the case because I am me, so anything I dream or intuit has to come through my lens and it’s only my lens. And that might get filtered through a lot of other different things. And we have to be careful to kind of know, you know, what’s mine, how much of that is me and how much of that is somebody else?

Alison : And then, yeah, that makes that’s you talk about that, about the baby and the swimming pool.

Bonnie : Yeah.

Alison : That was a great that was a great dream. Um, uh, if you dream about, uh, my eldest child dreams about my mother, who’s passed, um, pretty frequently. And I’m always really interested in those dreams. Is that my mom communicating with my child or, like, is that just basically only not only, but specifically rooted in my child?

Bonnie : I would have to talk to your child, but, um, I can address that. And it’s interesting, it really because I have been on the road a lot the last few weeks and doing a lot of workshops, talking to a lot of people, and that is, that has become the number one thing people ask me about. It used to be nightmares, and now people are asking me about this and they all want to know, is it a real visitation now? Um, if there’s a quality to it that feels different and the people are saying to me it felt different. I know it’s a visitation. It’s a visitation. If it’s like they just kind of showed up in the dream. And now I’m going to say it’s a part of you that you have, you know, reflected an aspect of them. And it depends on the quality. And it’s it’s a difficult thing to describe to people, but it’s kind of like, you know, the difference between an intuitive moment, you know, where like, your hair stands up on your arms or, you know, and time feels different versus just a, yeah, I’m going to go to the grocery store right now. That’s just a regular decision. So visitation dreams are kind of the same.

Jean : I can relate to exactly what you’re saying. It’s very hard to articulate, but I’ve had a dream where my husband, I had a dream about Alex, and I knew I was like, oh, he he was there. He was there. And other times I’ve had dreams and there was no substance to it. There was it was very fleeting. It really didn’t feel… But not many, but maybe three times I’ve had a dream where like a knowing almost. Oh, that that was.

Alison : Oh, that’s beautiful.

Jean : Or my grandmother.

Alison : Right, right, right, right. So.

Bonnie : Um, you you also, I wanted to ask you this. You talk about in the book, that jewelry store incident.

Bonnie : Yes.

Alison : You’re in a jewelry store, and it’s it’s like one connection after another, after another. And then it’s about moving to Paris and.

Bonnie : Moving to France. Yeah.

Alison : That’s right. And then the woman comes in, and this, this arbitrary woman comes in looking for necklaces, which I guess she couldn’t really see the way the the thing was positioned. And then , she you mention a town or someone mentioned the town. She goes, that was your dream. And like, books out of there. What what was she?

Bonnie : I don’t know. And that’s what’s so wonderful about dreaming.

Alison : Amazing. Like it gives me chills.

Bonnie : It is so amazing. So, you know, I want to go back to the visitation for one second because I work with a lot of, um, corporate people, people who are in, you know, very high up positions who come, you know, suit and tie, let’s say, sort of sense to them. And so many people say to me, you know, even sometimes our first meeting together, they lean in, even though it’s just the two of us on zoom. And they whisper, I think my grandmother visited me in a dream. And these are people that you wouldn’t think are into that kind of thing, right? But I, I really love that because we are connected and we are, there’s way more to life than what we see. And it’s so important to allow that. Just allow that to be the case. And when we start to say, okay, I’m I can allow that, I can be curious that there’s more than what meets the surface. Um, it’s little things. It’s little connections. I mentioned this dream workshop that I did the other day, and this man was saying, yeah, I understand that. And he goes, I was with my son and we were at a pond and we were watching this heron, and he said, suddenly I was looking at the pond and the heron and my son, but it was like all of a sudden the colors were way more vivid. And time just slowed down for us and we had such a meaningful moment. And he said, I just started connecting the dots to my son and our family and where we are and the heron and what that means to me. And he said I was having a dream while I was awake. And I said exactly. It’s just a different way of perceiving the world at a moment in time and seeing, kind of like reading between the lines, seeing something beyond just the surface.

Jean : Yes.

Alison : So that’s the exciting part of life.

Bonnie : Yeah. It’s so much more vivid. And I just wrote a blog this morning about falling in love with life. You know, there’s something that all the dreamers who work any amount of time with us at the institute say is everything becomes Technicolor. You know, like, just little things, like butterflies. I notice going to my car to go to work. Whereas before I would have been in my head busy thinking about my to do list, I would have missed it. You know, there’s miracles all around us in our most quotidian daily activities, but we’re so busy in our minds we miss it. So part of dreaming is just becoming very present to the wonder that’s all around us.

Alison : And it seems like a lot of people that we’re interviewing lately, another, uh, theme is curiosity.

Bonnie : Yeah.

Alison : I feel like that’s what your book really opened up for me. A whole curious thing of a whole other, you know, access point for me, which was, which was exciting, you know. Do you agree?

Jean : 100%. I know two people right in my mind now that I’m going to send your book to. They’re big dreamers and and I think this is going to be so helpful.

Alison : Yeah.

Jean : The work you’re doing is so inspiring and so beneficial, Bonnie.

Alison : Do you have a morning ritual?

Bonnie : I do..I it’s kind of extensive, right? But I’m also I prepare myself to teach. But the very first thing is to be in that I’m not awake but I’m not asleep space. And I really extend that even, it means for me when I have, you know, events to get to or appointments, really waking up with enough time to lay in that in between space. And a lot of the things I’ve written and, and created has come from that place. And they come in little like snapshots, like a whole chapter as a snapshot. And I get it. And I just make some little notes in my dream journal, and then I can do whatever in my day and then come back to it when I’m ready to actually do something with it. So I extend that time until I kind of I can just feel when it’s coming to a close, you know? And then I do some imagery exercises to clear myself and and get ready to start my day. And then I have my day. And then I do a cleansing ritual at the end of my day to clean up what has happened in the day, clear myself again, and get ready to receive something in the dream.

Alison : Wow, you’ve you’ve really paved your highway. I kind of love it.

Bonnie : I love that expression. I’ve never heard that– paved my highway…

Alison : (unclear audio)  You’re like, okay, I’m ready… Bring it on in. It’s great, you know?

Alison : Thank you. So thank you so much. I can’t tell you how much we both enjoyed the book, and, uh, just you and you’re so very peaceful.

Jean : Yeah. You’re lovely to speak with

Alison : You’re really so kind

Bonnie : Oh, thank you, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jean : We have two last questions, So the name of our podcast is Insidewink. And so what does that term mean to you?

Bonnie : So I love that question because we are getting these little inside winks all the time. What that means to me, how I dream it, as the dreamer of this dream, is it’s those little like a wink. It’s like those little fireflies that kind of light up for just a second and illuminate a next step. That’s all we need. And then we have to just be courageous enough to take that next little step. And then another little firefly is going to light up. So these little inside winks are kind of, for me, the dreaming. It’s like move there. Okay. Yeah. And I love that. What does it mean to y’all? Where did this come from?

Jean : Well, Allison imagined the word. So she came up with it. And, um, I think for me, I mean, it changes. But the core of the meeting is, what’s within yourself that wants to to to be acknowledged and, and winked at like, that’s a good thing within yourself. You know, you can be a great accountant, you can be a beautiful school teacher. But whatever that is within you, it’s like, that’s a good thing. Like winking at it.

Bonnie : Yeah.

Alison : And everyone that we asked the question to, all the answers are right. So that’s kind of the beauty of that expression. Like and everyone says something that is really how their, their personality shines through. You know, for me it just means that the it’s the curiosity, love and me sees that in you Bonnie and and and your deepest, your deepest part of your love and soul sees that in me and Jean. And that’s that’s kind of like we get each other without even realizing it from the get go.

Bonnie : I love it. You know, I love all three of these dreams so much. It’s wonderful.

Alison : And now for maybe the best dream. Do you like pie, cake or ice cream? What would you prefer?

Bonnie : Okay, out of those choices, I would choose pie. But if I can go off road and really dream it, it’s going to be cookies.

Alison : Oh.  What kind of cookies?

Bonnie : Chocolate chip. Ladies… Come on.

Jean : With or without walnuts?

Bonnie : Either.

Alison : Really?

Bonnie : I am a cookie monster.

Alison : Really?

Jean : Do you have a great chocolate chip cookie recipe?

Bonnie : I don’t, and I don’t cook with recipes very much. I just sort of, like, get in there. I know y’all have recipes on your website.

Jean : Well, I have a favorite recipe for chocolate chip cookie and.

Bonnie : Oh, send it.

Jean : I’ll Send it to you.

Bonnie : Please send it to me.

Jean :  I’ll send you my easy, but never fail-  phenomenal chocolate chip cookie.

Bonnie : I’m so grateful already because let me tell you, the cookie is pretty close to perfection, right?

Alison : I agree with you. Yeah.

Jean : Hail to the cookie.

Alison : That’s right. That’s right. All hail. Thank you so, so much, Bonnie. You’re just so wonderful. And I think people are going to get so much out of this. And you really are the Johnny Appleseed. You’re doing great.

Jean : You are.

Bonnie : Thank you. Thank you so much.

Jean : Thank you.

Bonnie : Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Alison : Have a beautiful day.

Bonnie : Thanks. Y’all too. Bye bye.

Jean : Well, I have now a completely new take on dreams– I’m going to be, i’m going to I’m going to have a oh, we’re going to each buy each other a dream journal.

Alison : That’s right. I’m going to buy you one and you’re going to buy me one so that we have our journals and we can really see if we can invest some time and thought, And I love the idea of staying in bed longer.

Jean : You know, and she’s not the only one that suggests that that morning time, it’s a it’s like a very potent time to to set your intention, um, to ask for help because you’re still not fully in the realm of the…

Alison : Waking.

Jean : 3d or whatever. You’re you still have this some energy left from the from the higher self.

Alison : I love that, right..  And I love that she, it felt, um, almost spiritual and scientific what she was talking about. Like, she really is coasting between those two sort of ideologies. Right? Like, she’s, like, talking about studies and and yet she’s talking about we’re all connected, which is what we discover every time we interview somebody.

Jean : Isn’t that true?

Alison : Right.

Jean : And I and I think that’s so beautiful that we really are awakening to a greater interconnectedness between each other.

Alison : Yeah. And that’s not an easy word to say.

Jean : No. And I did it without saying, um, and pausing for a few seconds.

Alison : I could not have done that. I’m very impressed right now.

Jean : Well, I’m impressed with Bonnie. Yeah.

Alison : Me too.

Jean : Her book is a wealth of information.

Alison : It’s so deep. There’s so much going on in the book. So if you have a minute to pick up, The Secret Mind,  or check out her website. And there is so much going on there and so many tools. It’s really great.

Jean : Yeah. And it’s and it’s it’s like exciting to see what will come forward.

Alison : Right.

Jean : Like when you pose a question to your higher self and you really take time to communicate– like what comes forth?

Alison : Right…

Jean : Yeah.

Alison : It’s like every morning could be like your birthday. Like little gifts, little gifts. In the morning, well have a great day and a great night. Dare I say a great night? Right?

Jean : Right.  Sweet dreams.

Alison : That’s right. There you go. Buy.