Ancient Dreams to Guide You with Dr. Bonnie Buckner

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 0:00
Oh, this is what I'm here to do. Is I'm supposed to understand how to fix my own nightmares and then teach that to other people. Dreams are a practical tool. The different stimulus that we encounter gives us ideas. We have intuitions, but we don't check into that. We don't pay attention to it. But all that comes out in our dreaming. If we know how to just speak a language of images.

Alex Ferrari 0:25
How do I actually use dreams to guide me in a big problem or solve a complex problem?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 0:31
For me, it's a blessing with dreams is it's playful. Dreams are playful. That jumbo jet dream, that's interesting. It's fascinating. Yeah, that's so different than if someone had, like, hit you over the head and said, Alex, you gotta go do this.

Alex Ferrari 1:00
Now before we jump into this episode, if this conversation resonates with you, please like, subscribe and share this with whoever you feel that needs to hear it. Your support helps us keep bringing this information out into the world and helps us awaken this planet. Thank you. I like to welcome to the show Dr Bonnie Buckner how you doing Bonnie?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:24
I'm great. Thank you so much for having me here.

Alex Ferrari 1:26
Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, because you speak about dreams, but you don't speak about dreams like I've had other people on the show speak about dreams, which is dream interpretation and all this. You know these kind of things, but you look at it as you have a very specific kind of dream teachings that you do, and you use dreams to help people evolve, to help people awaken, to help people guide them through life. That is something I haven't heard before. So before we go down this deep rabbit hole, what started you in interested in this space, like when you were a kid, did you go, I want to be a dream doctor?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 2:07
Kind of, actually, kind of, I didn't think about it as something that I want to be. It was more when I was three, I had had, I had been having just terrible nightmares, and it was really disturbing to me. And there was a moment where I was sitting out on our front steps just sort of thinking about this one morning. And in my mind, I was thinking, I just, if this is what, this is this being like our life, I how can I just keep dreaming these nightmares every night? So in my mind, I went through, you know, as kids do, like, maybe I'll just never go to sleep again. You know, what's the Guinness Book of World Records for never sleeping? Freddy Krueger, exactly, exactly. And then, really, it was just this sort of little flash, oh, this is what I'm here to do. Is I'm supposed to understand how to fix my own nightmares, and then teach that to other people. How old were you three?

Alex Ferrari 3:03
Stop it, yeah, wow. Really, that's a pretty deep insight at three,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 3:08
I think more young people know things like that. Oh yeah. Then we give them credit for

Alex Ferrari 3:14
Sure, and they forget it as they get older, because all the programming and all the stuff comes into them,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 3:18
They do. And that's a great point. So I had a family of dreamers. I didn't know that, but as I started to talk to them, you know, I'm really interested in dreaming. I'm really going to work with dreams someday. Not that I knew what any of that looked like or meant. My dad and my grandmother in particular would share dreams that they had and talk to me about it. My grandmother had premonitory dreams. There's a very big story in our family about her saving my uncle Charles's life because of a dream. And they started to share these stories with me, and it not only normalized that, it supported me in exploring that, and that is so critical, really

Alex Ferrari 4:03
Well there, if you can have a support system, it makes life a little easier as you're going down these kind of roads, which is not being a dream expert or going down this road as you are. It's not a standard process.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 4:16
No, it's not. And I didn't know what that looked like, and I didn't do it for a really long time, because what does that look like?

Alex Ferrari 4:23
How do I how do I support myself as a I'm saying dream doctor. I know you don't call yourself that, but like,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 4:30
Yeah, so you know, one of the things that my father had had suggested to me, he said, well, so your passion is dreams, but sometimes we can, like, put them in a different vehicle, like, what are the other things you're interested in? And I said, Well, psychology, writing, politics, film, in my mind, all of those things are about us, understanding us, and we're putting it out in terms of, you know, organization, or putting it out in terms of the stories we tell our. Themselves. So this was right about the time where I was wondering, like, I'm going to college, what am I going to major in? And so I majored in film. I worked in film and did some producing of documentaries for a while, and then I in 20, I guess, I can't remember the time. I guess 2004 America was thinking of going to Iraq and starting that war.

Alex Ferrari 5:26
That was, No, I was earlier, when was that? Was what? 2000 2001 happened, and then, yeah, 2002 2003 they were already, they were talking

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 5:36
So at that time, a friend of mine, who worked at a studio doing research. He said, You know, I think we can put this understanding of of people with my understanding of research, and we can do something to sort of, you know, shift that away from us going to war. And so we started a media, Political Research Company, worked with very high level campaigns, the John Kerry for President campaign being one of them. And it was at that time that I really began to hear inside myself, yeah, but dreaming, and now's the time. And it was one of those things that a series of dreams then led me to my dream teacher that changed the direction of my life.

Alex Ferrari 6:24
How does someone find a dream teacher?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 6:27
Yeah, so I started to I had a very important seminal dream where my father, who had passed away by that time, literally handed me off in this very ethereal place to a woman and that I didn't know, and I was so intrigued by her, and I left my father to get closer and closer to her, and this music she was playing, and I woke up and I just knew, you know, this woman, everything is going to change in my life. And so I just started to talk to more people about dreams, and I was meeting someone as a film, like a meet and greet kind of thing, and I had had a terrible nightmare that night. And I sat down, I said, I'm a little discombobulated today, and I'm sorry, but I had a terrible nightmare. And she said, Well, I know a little bit about dreams. Tell it to me. And I was thinking, Yeah, everybody knows a little bit about dreams, but I told it to her, and she spoke back to me in a sound I could hear, and she said, You should meet my teacher. So that's how and that they came really right after each other. So we have to be open to synchronous, yeah, really. And I call it walking through waking life with dreamer's ears. And so I met her teacher. It was she became my teacher, Dr Katherine Shaneberg. I studied with her for 10 years, and then she said to me, you need to get a PhD in psychology and really kind of marry the two. And that's when I bring in, you know, cognitive and neuropsychology and how I talk about dreams,

Alex Ferrari 8:03
That's beautiful. So you talk about the secret mind. What is the secret mind? How does that differ from like the waking consciousness?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 8:10
Let's go back to something you said earlier about kids kind of knowing at least their attractions, their interests, what they like, and then that getting covered over. So there's a sort of inner true self. I call it the dreaming self. And then there's all the outside world that we live in, and we often know things that we want to pursue, interests, passions, things like this. And somewhere along the way, someone says that's stupid. You can't make money doing that. That's not our family. We're not creative people. We're accountants or whatever people tell us, right?

Alex Ferrari 8:50
Like a dream doctor or a filmmaker,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 8:52
Exactly. And so things get layered on, and that secret mind is always there, but it's only secret because we're not paying attention to it. We're paying attention to these roads that other people have carved out for us, and not the road that our inside wants us to pursue. So when we start to plug into that secret mind, not only is it about finding that big you know, capital P, purpose thing, which is really just exercising who we really are. It's also about those little things you talked at the beginning about how I talk about solving problems. For me, dreams are a practical tool that we can use, because if we slow down that big arc and look at it as just a day in a day, we're so busy, we're checking off boxes. We're driving places. We get lost. I got lost coming here today, all these life things happen, and inside we have a lot of thoughts about that, a lot of reflections, responses to it, the different. Stimulus that we encounter gives us ideas. We have intuitions, but we don't check into that. We don't pay attention to it. But all that comes out in our dreaming, if we know how to just speak a language of images. It's a very clear language, but we're so verbally attuned that that little gap is what makes people often dismiss dreams as not having anything to say,

Alex Ferrari 10:29
Right! It's just like, Oh, it's just the brain. The brain,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 10:31
Yeah, that was weird. So it doesn't have anything to say to me.

Alex Ferrari 10:34
So I'm gonna go down the spiritual side a little bit. Yeah, dreams, because it's, it's something that I, I find really interesting when you're talking about pictures as a language of pictures, to my understanding, being a psychic medium is exactly the same thing. The they sometimes they hear auditory but a lot of times it's images that will come in, and it's up to the medium or the psychic to interpret those. So that's why you when you see a psychic reading, it'd be like, there's a rose. Does a rose mean anything to you? Right? Right? You know? And just, oh, my mom used to sell roses, okay, okay, and that kind of thing, and they're just trying to interpret that line. So it sounds like spirit, in many ways, is language, is images and dreams, is the the way that a lot of the other side kind of talks to us. That's the way I always looked at it myself. When I have a dream, I'm like, Okay, what is spirit trying to tell me? What is it trying to warn me about? What is it trying to tell me I have to work on? What is it guiding me on? And I've had a few dreams you don't remember them often there, I'm sure you can help with that. I can. But generally speak, most people don't remember, but I do have a few that I remember. And one really specific one was I was still living in LA, and I was in the space of, do I keep going with next level solar? Don't I go with Next Level Soul? And I had a dream, and the dream was I was at the top of one of the hills or mountains in LA, and I could see all of LA, like, just as a, you know that beautiful shot that we all know? Yeah, there's all the shiny lights. It was night, and then this jumbo jet plane flies over me, but it's very not proportional. It's like, it's a, it's basically Godzilla plane. It's like, this giant plane. It makes a U turn, crashes into the city, and, you know, the buildings look like little Legos, and it's coming hurling towards me, but it doesn't hurt me, and it doesn't, like get to me, but that's the and I was like, What the hell does that? And I was about to get on a plane three days later. So I'm like, is it? And it's never from what I understand, and tell me if I'm wrong or for your experience. It's never exactly what it's about. It's never on the nose. So it's, you know, a a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but sometimes it's something else, as Freud would say. So from my understanding, dreams are usually not on the nose, meaning, like, if it's a plane coming towards you or crashing, it's not about you're going to get into a plane crash. It's about something else that they're trying to tell you. So I actually asked my spirit, my spirit guide here, Connie, on earth, I have to preface that. I go, what does that mean? She's like, well, it means that you got to hurry up and finish and get back on, get back on the train with next level soul, and if not, it's going to be a fairly disastrous thing for you if you don't do it. I'm like, oh, okay, that's that was her interpretation of it. Sure. So everything I say that any of this makes sense, does it ring true to you? What's your experience?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 10:34
Absolutely, but the most important thing is it rang true to you. So a cigar is not always a cigar, but also a cigar to you is not a cigar to me. We all have our own language of images. Yeah. So life is intensely subjective. We are in a very, very unique vehicle called our body, our physical body, and we discount that enormously, especially in the modern age, because we separate mind body, but that very different body means that I'm going to have very different experiences than anybody else, and you're going to have different experiences. And then add that to where we grew up, where we were raised, like life becomes our universe spinning within ourself, let's say, and we're also connected. So one of the things that's really important is to understand that images are universal language. You know, that's we do know that we use emojis all the time these days, right? Yeah, it's that's a really important point, because images are universal. We can see something and we can talk about that image, whether it's, you know, you speak Russian, I speak

Alex Ferrari 10:34
A smile is a smile, no matter where you Yeah, you know

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 11:25
Exactly. But when we get into. Seems like, what is that smile doing? Where is that emoji in my you know, story of the dream. That's where my subjectivity comes in. That's how I start to understand what I'm being told from me to me, love Bonnie. Dreams are a letter to the self, really

Alex Ferrari 12:22
Now, but so from your from your perspective, how much of the spiritual is involved in this? Like, how much do you believe that? Like, I've had grandma visit me in my dreams, you know, and, and those kind of things, and, and sometimes it's just very warm, kind of, like, it's going to be okay, kind of thing. And I haven't thought about her, said, and seen a picture of her or anything for years, let's say, and then she just shows up, you know. So I believe that, I personally believe that it is a way for the other side to connect with us, guide us in many ways, and it also could be our higher selves connecting with us, like you said, a letter from you to you, yeah, so would you agree? Or how? What's your point of you on the spiritual side of all of this?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 12:22
Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I want to say is, you know, we're let's expand our idea of spiritual, because we tend to chop things into little boxes. In our modern time, we tend to say, you know, there's mind and then there's body. Body gets kicked to the curb. Usually everybody thinks they're just a brain, where we're a system. We tend to separate out material spiritual. We put a lot more value on spiritual, but we're in a material body, and if we think of that as one thing, then we start to heal ourselves, because we're all suffering those divisions. We understand our world because of duality. There's hot, but we only know it's hot because we have cold, right? So we understand things from duality, but at some point, we're meant to transcend that duality and see that those two sides of something is one coin. You see what I'm saying. So back to your question about premonitory dreams, or visitation dreams, versus dream dreams, let's call them. There is a difference, and it's usually a felt difference. You know, I've had loved ones, particularly my father, visit me in dreams, and those visitation dreams just feel different. Their time moves differently. I know it, and usually I ask him, What are you doing here? You're dead, and it kind of establishes things. But I also have a lot of dreams where dad is in my dream, but it's just dad as a guy I understood. And so one of the things that you can do to sort of, first of all, distinguish which kind of dream we're talking about. And then secondly, for all those people that we know who show up in a dream, you can ask the question, you know, Alex is the kind of guy who, or my dad is the kind of guy who, and finish that sentence, is a reflection of something in me. Every aspect of a dream is an aspect of the dreamer for those everyday, regular dreams. So my dad was a very courageous kind of guy. That's something in me that's saying, Okay, bring forward that potential in you to be very courageous. Because it's in you. Let's bring it forward.

Alex Ferrari 18:30
And that's, and that's why you see dreams kind of helping you in that way to kind of bring those things out.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 18:35
Absolutely, we hide so many aspects of ourselves. Oh god, yeah. And we don't even know it. You know?

Alex Ferrari 18:41
It's it's the programming, it's the programming, it's the trauma, it's the society, it's all the expectations, your parents, your friends, your country, your religion, all these things are dumped on you. And it's so true. Like, if you look at a child, they are so free, yeah, and so fun. And as they get a little older and older, they start to disconnect from spirit in many ways. Because when you're young, you're very close to source, because you just came in, yeah, you're fresh totally. And then at the end, when you're about to go, you also are connected to source, because you're going back towards it. So people in hospice and things like that, absolutely start feeling that as well. But as a child, you start getting older, and then

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 19:24
We get busy Alex.

Alex Ferrari 19:25
We get busy. We get we get caught up in the simulation. We get caught up in this, this world, this three dimensional world, and then all the other stuff that happens to us, and all the programming and all this stuff to the point we would forget how to be a child. We forget how to connect. We forget to look inward for guidance exactly, and we start looking outward for guidance. And that's that's a recipe for disaster.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 19:48
It is, and that's why I say, you know, capital P. Purpose is really simple. A lot of people come to me and they're like, What is my purpose? Am I supposed to be a writer? Am I supposed to be you know, I. We're just supposed to live our true self, and that is so it's the game changer, because if you think about it, let's, let's go deep just a little bit here. I have a true self that wants to express itself. If I start hiding that True Self now there's a little disconnect in me, which means there's a little conflict in me. Maybe I start feeling a little resentful about life, or a little bit negative or a little bit cynical that I'm not able to be who I really want to be in life. These little conflicts, they're like static on my radio, and it has an effect on every single other person that I'm in contact with, I start to close things off. Maybe I don't love as big, maybe I hold back hugging. Maybe I, you know, get triggered any of these kinds of things, and so roll it all back. If I just deal with my own inner conflicts, that begins to change. How many people am I touching in my life?

Alex Ferrari 21:04
Interesting. It's so very true that we are always looking for exterior, outside of ourselves, because that's what we're trained to do. Yeah, knowledge, books, people, organizations. They're the ones are gonna give this answer. It's more of the Eastern philosophies that look inward, and I think more people are starting to understand that with meditation being so so, you know, so popular around the world now and doing things that are inward and quiet. Because, as you know, we had a lovely conversation about AI before we started, which we will not get into. But the world is becoming so busy, so crazy, and so many things are coming at us that people are it's overwhelming. They can't handle it, and now they're starting to look for answers elsewhere. Look inward, get training inward, finding books like yours, finding shows like me, or your work, or my work, and they're starting to look inward for the answers, which is the true answer, not the exterior stuff, that it's just someone else's opinion idea, exactly, yeah, they could guide you into the internal. So your work is a way to guide people back into themselves, inside in the dream state. In their dream state is, is the lane you're in, and that is so beautiful that you're doing that

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 22:14
Well, you know, what's so beautiful is all of us have our own it's, it's our gift. We have been given the ability to dream every single person. It doesn't take an authority or an expert, or anybody else. Everybody dreams, even our dogs dream. Everybody dreams. Cat dreams too, absolutely. Actually, they are, in terms of dream research, they're the champion dreamers. They dream more hours a day than any other animal,

Alex Ferrari 22:56
Absolutely, because they're sleeping a lot of time,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 22:58
I know. So it's our it's our innate birthright of healing. We all have it. It's it's there for us. It's every night. All we have to do is just start to pay attention to it.

Alex Ferrari 23:16
So Bonnie, let me ask you, so we're talking about dreams on a very esoteric kind of broad spectrum. But how can we actually use dreams to help guide us? Because that's that's an aspect of dreams I've never really thought about. I've thought about it as as a passive viewer, yeah, like the other side, or spirit, or even my internal subconscious, is trying to tell me something, a higher self, whatever you want to call it, in dreams, and it's a very passive way, but you talk about it more as a non passive way, as a more like, you know, I'm gonna, how do I actually use dreams to guide me in a big problem, or solve a complex problem, or answer a question, like, What is my purpose? Am I supposed to be a writer? Am I supposed to be a drag queen? What is it?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 23:59
Yeah, exactly. So there's a couple of different ways of looking at the practical aspect of dreams. You asked a question earlier about remembering dreams start there. So get a journal and write down whatever comes up when you wake up. And right there I could I just that is healing. And here's how, I can't tell you the number of times people come to me to do work with me, and they're like, Yeah, I didn't really have a dream. And then I start asking them a few questions of what they woke up with, and they have this really long dream, like multiple paragraphs, and I'm like, why didn't you give me that dream? And they say, well, it didn't make sense to me, so I didn't want to write it down. It was too weird. I was embarrassed. I thought it might mean something too scary to look at. We start our self criticisms before we even get out of bed, and that right there when we truly understand that and we shift it and. We decide to open up to what's coming through. That's the first step of healing something, and that's major, just to stop blocking the messages that are coming to you, stop blocking the reflections that are available to you, and just open out to it. And that's what makes children so free, because they have fun, they're curious. They're open. They see some weird thing, and they pick it up, and, oh, it's a slug, you know? Whereas we're like, that's weird, don't, don't touch it. Maybe it's poisonous, exactly,

Alex Ferrari 25:32
That's fascinating. Um, so then let me ask you, what is the purpose? Well, let me go back when we're dreaming and using it to heal ourselves trauma. How does that work? How can we use dreams to heal our trauma or or do shadow work, in many ways, dreaming, using dream work, dreams to do the shadow work of inner reflection and looking ourselves in the mirror and all of that, which is probably, arguably one of the toughest things people have to do, is to be truthful with themselves.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 26:06
That's what I'm talking about. But the thing that's so it, for me, it's a blessing with dreams is it's playful. Dreams are playful. That jumbo jet dream that's interesting. It's fascinating. Yeah, that's so different than if someone had, like, hit you over the head and said, Alex, you got to go do this like you. You're going to reject it, or you're going to say, Okay, I'll do it. But either way, it's not your own sort of playful engagement with that. So there's a few different things to answer your question. You talked about the mirror holding up the mirror, and you also talked about with that jumbo jet dream, it's never straight on. So right now, if we wanted to know how our hair looks in the back of our head, we have to use a mirror. We cannot see our back without a mirror and a system of mirrors, and it's never full on. I can put the mirror in front of me and I'm not gonna see it. You gotta put it with another one an angle or another one, yeah, exactly. It's a system of angles, or in dream time facets. So every aspect of a dream is an aspect of the dreamer. That jumbo jet. Alex the city. Alex the U turn, the movement of that U turn. Alex the potential crash. Alex, all of that you know. And that jumbo jet, the Godzilla sized jet, speaks to how much energy you have to take something from one place to another. That's what jets do. And it's jumbo, jumbo, jumbo. And look what you've created for yourself so and it's a higher level of thinking. It's high above, you know, planes fly above the clouds, so when we start to look at every aspect of that dream as an aspect of me, so I'm the jet with all that potential. If I'm not sending it straight on and I'm you turning, then I'm going to crash. Then playfully, I get it. Now I can change. I can shift my direction, etc. When we think about, you know, I talk about seven different kinds of dreams. So one of the kinds of dreams is a clear dream. And a clear dream has both potential and block. That's this dream that you're talking to me about. And within those kinds of clear dreams, they tell us dreams are operating in our present tense. They're really part of our present tense experiencing so if I look at that kind of dream, I see, here's my potential, here's the block. But the dream is also showing me how to get over that block, which is turn the plane around and go straight. Don't make a U turn, you see, keep it up in the air and keep it going, as an example. So when we start to look at these kinds of things, it's not just the, you know, looking at the good, bad and the ugly in there. But it's also bringing to the fore what I call latent potentials, these things that I have in me, but I've pushed to the side because of all the reasons we've been talking about that cause people to hide themselves.

Alex Ferrari 29:17
What is funny is, every time I have a dream, and I want to talk about people who don't dream as much at all, and I'll talk to because that's a question I have. But when I dream, I always I talk to my dreams like they're my spirit guides, or they're someone guiding me. And sometimes they'll come a dream and I'll wake up and I'll barely remember, like remember glimpses of it, and by the time I'm having breakfast, it's gone, and I'll, and I'll, I'll say as I get up, because there's that, there's that time period where you're not awake and you're not asleep.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 29:47
Yeah, that's such a great time period for our creativity.

Alex Ferrari 29:51
Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing because you're, it's, it's, I wish, well, meditation gets you there, if you do it right, so you can get to that place of that magical place. Is, but what I'll do is like, I'll come out of the dream and I'm in that halfway point, and I'll just be sitting there, and I'll just literally talk, start talking, not out loud, but in my mind, to to my my spirit team, if you will, and I go, guys, you got to raise the production value if you want me to remember and like. And it's so funny, because when I say production value for people don't understand, it's like, it has to be bigger budgets. You budgets, bigger extravaganzas, things that are going to make me remember, and then very often, a day or two later, I'll get another dream, and it's like, explosions and like, that's my language. Yeah, my language is cinema. So I'll have cinematic dreams. Yeah, for me and you, and I'd love to ask you this as well, for me, for me to be able to remember a dream very clearly, someone in the film industry has to be in it, you know, or someone in the spiritual space has to be in it. So, like, if Yogananda shows up, or, yeah, something like that, I'll remember instantly. But if it's a director, so Steven Spielberg shows up in my or Chris Nolan shows up, who both have shown up in my dreams, I'll remember it instantly. Sometimes I'll get celebrities, but, like some actors sometimes, but I'm like, it's a cast who's casting up there. I need bigger names if you want me to remember this. Like, why is George Lucas in this dream? Like, all of a sudden, there's something in the brain that makes me connect and remember it so much easier. Maybe it's a hook of some sort, because of the celebrity, or because of the impact of that person's work, or just me knowing it. Spielberg has been in my dreams many times. So as a lot of the big directors, Scorsese, all of these guys, because they're the ones that I remember, and I can probably rattle off a handful of dreams I remember because of those people in it. So what is your take on the celebrity or something that is in a person's dream that will make them remember more and more?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 31:51
Yeah, you remember not because something clicks in your brain, but because it moves your body. So if a person who you don't know in waking live, and you can't see them very clearly in a dream, is doing something you don't care. That's bad casting. Bad cast, exactly. But you care about Steven Spielberg, right? So when he shows up in the dream, it moves your body in some way, emotion, yeah, you know, I can tell you right now, there are also a tremendous number of politicians that are in people's dreams and world leaders, right? Because we emotionally engage in our waking time with that. So the dream is like, okay, cool, that person gets you going, so let's just use that as part of telling a story back to you, because you'll remember, and this is why I say actually, nightmares are our friends. And they're our friends because we wake up and remember them. And so it's like a little kick in the butt, like, hey, you've got to tangle in your waking life. And so get going and untangle it. And so let me back up on nightmares. I really love to talk about nightmares. That was my next question, yeah, because people come to me with nightmares frequently. And again, it's that being woken up because a nightmare is typically a very acute emotion, anger or fear. And so we wake up and our body has been jolted. This is one of the interesting things about dreams. They're not a thought exercise. They come from our bodies. They move our bodies. And you know, again, watch your family pet. Our bodies are twitching. We're running, chasing squirrels, exactly right? And we feel something. We feel, Oh my gosh. I can't believe that nightmare. You know, a woman came to me and she had this nightmare of walking into a stadium and just blazing it with a flame thrower. And she woke up, yeah, and she was like, Oh my gosh, is this me? And we started talking about it, and then she realized, you know, I'm actually really angry in my life. I thought I had a lid on it, but I'm lashing out, which is the same as, you know, blow torching. And she said, I'm lashing out, and my family and my team. And so one of the things I say is, whatever we're living in waking time, we're dreaming at night, and whatever we're dreaming at night, we're living in waking time, and as soon as you make that connection, she just shifted in waking time. I need to really get in here and deal with my anger, and, you know, not lash out and get to the root of it, so we heal ourself. We can also go into a dream and shift a dream, and I'll get into that later, but right now, in terms of dream, recall that nightmare is okay. There's a knot like a tangle, and we need to unknot it. So I also talk out loud to my dreams a lot. Are you kidding me? Like, okay, here we go. So it's telling you, you've got to not and it's creating all these conflicts in your life. So just go back, wake up to it, and then go back in and fix it.

Alex Ferrari 35:09
So with all these, the fear for nightmares, for me, has always been usually about fear. There was a dream I've said on the show, but it's just one of the dreams I'll never forget. I was a kid. I was living in an apartment. I was probably in sixth grade, seventh grade, and I was living in my apartment in Florida. And I wake up in my apartment and I hear a knock at the door, and I it's just like it felt like absolutely real life. And I opened the door, and there's this dark figure in a trench coat, faceless sitting there, and I automatically get scared because he's giant, comparatively to me. And then I said, Wait a minute, I'm dreaming. I literally became conscious. Yeah, great, in the dream. Oh, I'm dreaming. Oh, I'm gonna kick this guy, you know, ass, because I grew up in the 80s, and that's what you would do, very Freddy Krueger esque, like, I'm gonna start fighting with my dream. So I go to kick him in the butt, in the balls, yeah, okay, and he blocks it, and I'm like, Oh, I'm out of here, and I just woke up.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 36:10
Yes. Now here's the thing, your first move is to kick him, yeah, right. But that's a part of you that wants you to open the door to it. And so if you think about things, can I speak about this dream?

Alex Ferrari 36:24
Please go for it. Okay? Because I mean, I mean, this is six or seven. I was six or seven, so I don't know where I was in that time in my life that this dream, what that meant. So please tell me what you get your interpretation.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 36:34
Well, frequently, right? There are aspects of us that are wanting us to see them, and it's the very aspect that we typically want to hide under the rug, because someone told us, you know, that's not an okay thing for expressing ourself. We can fight with it. It's probably what we're doing in waking time, or we can open the door to it and take the trench coat off, take the mask off the hat and see what it is. And actually a really great story. I was at a dinner, and someone comes up to me, this was in France, and someone comes up to me and says, Are you the American who's the dream teacher? And I said, Yes. And she said, I want to tell you a dream that I had, a repetitive nightmare. I had it for three years, and finally it resolved. And in that dream, someone was knocking on the door, and she knew it's a super scary figure, kind of similar to yours, and she would get right to the door and then freak out and wake herself up. And she said, finally, I had a dream where I went to the door and I opened it, and it was a man standing there, and he said, I love you. And she was crying, telling me this, and she said, that was me, and I needed to learn to love me. Oh, wow, it's powerful.

Alex Ferrari 37:51
That's super powerful, I know. So where does that come from? Where does that dream come from? Is my question to you, is it spirit? Is it your subconscious? Is it? Is it the mind trying to process what, in your opinion, did this come from? Because that's pretty profound.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 38:09
It's incredibly profound, and it's not rare. These are the kinds of things I work on with people daily. So take out mind trying to process that's too separated. I talked about our dreaming self that's bigger than we are. You can talk about it in terms of spirit, sure, because that dreaming self is connected to spirit. We're all connected. And this is the thing that I hope, in things that I say, and in the dreaming work, people recognize we're all connected, and this big all gets squeezed into Bonnie. And then we further squeeze ourselves by not opening the door to aspects of ourself, by not loving certain part parts of ourself and our bigger part of our self that's not confined in this material body comes in at night and is like, Wait a minute. Take a look at this. Check this out. Got a message for you. Pay attention to me, and then we can expand ourselves.

Alex Ferrari 39:16
So what is your take on people who don't dream as much as they used to. So like, personally, I rarely have dreams anymore that I remember. Usually I would remember, like, something happens, a little glimpse of something. But I haven't, like, had dream dreams in a long time, and I have a spirit of a spiritual explanation for that from my teachers. But I'd love to hear your point of view on the dreaming cycle, like, I'm sure I'm something's going on, but I don't remember, like, anything when I wake up. So I'm like, Oh, I guess I didn't dream last night. Or if I did, I don't remember it. So what's your take on that? Do you have a dream journal? I don't. I don't have a dream. I used to, but I just don't, but I don't wake up. It's not like I woke up and I'm like, Oh, I had that. Dream. Let me write it down. I wake up and there's nothing

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 40:02
I know, yeah, but just get a dream journal, send me an email, let me know, because it's about, it's about saying, You know what, I'm open to whatever's coming in, and getting back into the discipline of writing it down. They'll come back. So here's the science. If we want to go to science for a minute, everybody dreams every night. Sure that makes sense. And you know, people who come into sleep research studies, they'll say, I don't dream. And then, because they're there for a study, they're like, Oh, I had a dream. It's it takes just a tiny little bit of inspiration to get us going again. On dreaming. Now, we talked earlier about the dreams that have big production value, that make us remember them right. Those big dreams typically come at a moment when it's time to go, you know, take a right turn, get off the main road. Let's do something different time in our life, or we're trying to work through some kind of difficulty, like this woman having this dream for three years, we'll dream intensely, if we're open to it around those times. And then maybe we're on our path for a while, and we get to sort of just integrate that into our life, but then we're always evolving. So just wait. There's going to be another dream that's going to come in and be like, Okay, now here's our next. Yeah, this way exactly

Alex Ferrari 41:31
Can people use dreams to unlock not only their purpose, but their hidden dreams, meaning their hidden loves, things that they might have suppressed from when they were a child, you know, like, I really wanted to be an artist, but absolutely, and I had a talent for art, but that, you know, my parents had, they could be a doctor. So I'm a doctor. And then every once in a while, you watch America's Got Talent, and you'll see a doctor go up there and just start singing, yeah, he's like, Hey, I've been, I've been a pediatrician for the last 30 years, but my real dream is I want to sing, and there's amazing singing or something along those lines. So how can we use dreams to unlock those, those hidden dreams, and our purpose of why we're supposed to be here?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 42:10
Yeah, so this happens to me a lot. Another person came up to me once at an event,

Alex Ferrari 42:17
They keep coming up to you.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 42:18
It's like a medical doctor. I don't, but people know, you know a little bit about me. And so another person came up to me and said, You're the dream teacher. Yes, I am. I want to tell you a story. You know, people like to tell me their dreams and and I think it's important. Okay, side note, tangent. One of the things I do at my institute is we have dream groups. We have dream classes. I cannot more put more emphasis on the fact that it's important for us to dream together, to hear our dreams, to hear what's meaningful to each other. It is such a healing space, so and it fits into what you just asked me, this woman says to me, I do what I do for a living because of a dream. And she said, here's the dream. There's I'm standing in Paris, and I'm next to the river Seine, and a horse and carriage is coming towards me, and then I turn my head just a little bit, and I see a red motorboat zipping away from me, and she said, I woke up and I knew I couldn't wait any longer to do what I really wanted to do in life, which was about both writing and the arts. And she quit her job that day, and within three months, she had her current job, which was she wrote for a very large publication as a journalist covering the arts, and she said that was the hiccup, right? Like, those two things don't make sense. What does it mean to be both a writer and somehow in the arts, like, how does this piece together? She goes, I didn't have the image of piecing it together. But what happened with that dream. It plugged her into a feeling. Do I want to feel like this horse and carriage every day, plodding along, dusty, tired, or do I want to be that motorboat? And this comes back to that language of images. They're also it's a language of feeling, and that's really important. That doctor who gets up on America's Got Talent and sings, that person got up there because they had a feeling that they couldn't deny any longer. And that was the thing she said, I couldn't wait any longer to do what I really wanted to do. So part of what dreams do is wake us up to the thing that we know we want to do, but we buried it so deeply that, you know, we're like covering our eyes to it and not paying attention to it.

Alex Ferrari 42:18
So it sounds like a lot of times we don't move or change as a human until one. You get to a certain level that's unbearable,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 43:11
Boiling the frog

Alex Ferrari 43:39
Yeah, it's the boiling the frog thing, yeah? Because if you're in the middle, which is the worst place to be, yeah, it's not too bad, but it's not too good. And you're like, I still making a check. I'll keep going to this job. It's not that bad. I like Uncle Bob, he works there, and like, oh, that kind of stuff. So only when it gets to a place that it's unbearable is when you make the change. It sounds like dreams can take you there quicker and will lessen your need to just ignore the call of whatever you're supposed to be doing. I call it the sledgehammer at first, at first the universe, it goes, Hey, exactly, then there's a tap, there's a push, a Shug, and then the sledgehammer just hits you across the head. And you're like, Oh, I guess I gotta go do that. And sometimes, the way the universe works, it places you in a place where I just lost my job, right? I have to do something else. Now, exactly, you're forced, you're pushed, yeah, like, you know, but it didn't have to be that way. Dreams. It sounds like can actually speed that process up with a lot less a simulation. So it's not like, I'm really gonna lose my job, but like, if you don't go down, if you get on that speed boat, you're gonna lose your job, and then you're gonna get there, but that could be a year from now, or you could just do this right now,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 46:21
But it's not a simulation. It's very real, because it's showing us what our energies are doing, correct? It's like your energy is an arrow and it's on this track, and we're gonna show you the track it's on, and you can at any moment, intervene to push that energy somewhere else, if my energy is all focused on hiding and hiding, and there's the tap, and here it is. Then okay, the universe is going to give us the sledgehammer. And then there's a question of what we do with the sledgehammer, because there are many people who just continue to I lost my job, and then it just, you know, I'm not even paying attention to the sledgehammer. If we listen to our dreams and we're really developing a relationship to our dreaming, it's little course corrections all the way.

Alex Ferrari 47:08
Subtle. It doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be the sledgehammer doesn't have to be it's gonna be just like a little left, a little bit to the right, little bit like that.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 47:16
Talk to this person. When's the last time you talked to this person? And then those dreamers ears that I talked about earlier. Listen, listen to what these Synchronicities are. Stay open to everything, and before you know it, you've just carved your own path. It's not because you know, it's just the dream gave you a little subtle thing.

Alex Ferrari 47:37
Now, can dreams help you shift limiting beliefs about yourself?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 47:42
Oh, yeah, that's the big one. That's the really big one. So all of these things, let's think about that belief system. I mean, that is the most abstract statement ever, that is not like this microphone. That's tangible. I can look at it. We can discuss it, you know, roll it around. Look at it from every angle. Belief system, you have a self defeating belief system that doesn't help anybody. What do I do with that? What does it look like? But if I see a jumbo jet doing a U turn, I deal with the jet. Forget about the abstractions of belief systems, patterns, all these things that are so abstract,

Alex Ferrari 48:22
It cuts through all of it. Cuts through all of it. That's interesting, because then the way dreams are working, it is cutting through your programming. It cuts through what your belief systems are that you were raised with, and it gets to the core of who you truly need to be, or you need to be, or where you need to be, but it just cuts through all the crap. So it doesn't really, if you, in your waking life believe I can never make a living as an artist, that's impossible. They're all starving, yeah, even though there's millions of examples of non exactly,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 48:54
but you can't tell that to someone who's awake that's holding that belief system right, but

Alex Ferrari 48:59
in the dream, yeah, it cuts through all of that. It does. It's your it seems like, in the dream state, your guard is gone. It is you have no barrier. You can't argue with it. It's just what it is. And it seems as close as you can get to spirit as possible. The spirit from my experience, is it's not neither good nor bad, it's just is. Yeah.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 49:26
So here's what happens in our brain when we go to sleep and we start to dream, the default network, which is the neural processing system that lights up when we're dreaming. And I want to emphasize, again, dreaming is a full body thing. I'm just talking about what you know, the vision inside our brain looks like that. Default system really lights up. It gets supremely active. And the part of our brain, the executive network, that is the one that criticizes judges patterns, it's literally taking. And offline. So whether we want it or not, we're in this dream state where every possibility is not only shown to us, you know, not all at once, obviously, but what we need to hear at that point in our life is not only shown to us. We're engaging with it as I I am in the stream, and I decide to take this train and go here because it's i and I'm embodied, and I'm feeling the consequences of these choices. Oh, my God, I missed that train, and I feel the consequence of not getting on the train. Then something is able to shift in me, and then I can wake up and I can have that discussion with myself. I've seen the belief system every time something is possible, I don't do it. I'll give you an example. I worked with a person who had a series of dreams that all had the same kind of theme and one specific dream, he's on a train a girl he knows who's been successful Post University, gets on. She's wearing a bright yellow sweater, and he looks outside, and suddenly is super snowy, and all of a sudden he just gets off the train. And so where our conversation started there is, what am I getting off instead of going all the way? And what is the belief system of getting off before going all the way? And it's very easy to articulate at that point, I don't believe I can. I don't, you know, but because it's felt I don't want to get off the train, then we can actually do a waking dream exercise, go back into the dream, get back on the train, and go all the way to center and see what is there. And it's not even necessarily about seeing what's there. It's the feeling of shifting that pattern in our body, energy of going all the way, because now our whole life has changed. Now in my waking time, I've married my conscious thinking with my dreaming self, or what you called earlier, the subconscious, and I have broken that pattern consciously. I have consciously felt seen and done in my imagination going all the way, and then I can do it.

Alex Ferrari 52:26
It's almost like, what's it called visualization, when you do visualizations in waking life, like you just sit there, and was it they did an experiment, like they had a group of kids sit there and pretend in their mind that they were making the shot again in the basketball court and making the shot, making the shot, making the shot, and then for the same 10 or 15 minutes, they had another team practice, and the kids who visualized got more shots in

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 52:53
Absolutely and what's so great is, instead of that scenario, practice doing a shot, our dreams serve it up to us. They get us teed up and ready to go. Here you are. You're on the train. There's this person who is an aspect of you, bright yellow, Sunny sweater in the middle of this frozen landscape, who is successful, and you get off the train.

Alex Ferrari 53:16
So there's a very famous dream that happened in Hollywood for film director, I'm not sure you've ever heard the James Cameron story.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 53:24
No.

Alex Ferrari 53:24
So James Cameron, everyone who's listening did Titanic and Avatar and 1000 other amazing films that he's done, and he was on his first feature, which was piranha to the spawning.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 53:40
Oh, okay, I missed that one.

Alex Ferrari 53:43
He goes, it's the best, this, best piranha, flying piranha movie ever made. He says he was fired midway through, and but he's James Cameron, so he wanted control and all this stuff. And he's in Rome. I think they're shooting it in Rome.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 54:01
There's a piranha movie in Rome. Got it. Course, why not?

Alex Ferrari 54:02
And he snuck in. He used to sneak in at night to the edit room and re edit everything. So when the editor got it was like, what like back in the day when you were edited?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 54:11
Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 54:11
Well, he got deathly ill. He had this massive fever, and he went to sleep with this fever and had this fever dream, which I want to talk about fever dreams in a minute. Yeah, but he had this fever dream, and in that dream, he saw a metal Ecto skeleton rising from a burning rubble, which is the Terminator, absolutely. And that began his career. So my question to you really began, who we know is, you know he, that's him as Terminator, was the first thing that broke James Cameron. So my question to you is, when these kind of dreams come into your life, these innovative dreams, like like Tesla talked about dreams. Einstein talked about dreams that they figure things out, or they're inspired. By something they see in a dream that basically is a gift to humanity. In many and many depending on who it is, is a gift to not only humanity, but a lot of times it's a gift to you. Like perfect example is James, when he did when he had the Terminator me that changed his life totally. He was at the lowest point of his life when he had that dream. Yeah, he was fired off his first movie. He's never gonna get another movie made. He's in Rome with a fever. I'm making a piranha, flying piranha movie. It's the sequel to piranhas that even piranhas piranha to the spine. And now he's his whole career changed, and arguably, you know, the world's the world changed because he made these movies that changed the world in many ways. So where does that come from? Because now it's not just a reflection. It's not like a walk through. Now there's creative ideas coming through and that are changing people's lives. Where did those creative ideas are being generated? Because that's a real specific

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 55:59
It is. But here's the thing, ex post facto, we know the Terminator, but in that dream, he rose up out of his own fire, of being fired, yeah, he rose up

Alex Ferrari 56:12
As the Terminator,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 56:14
It was called the term, but, but you see what I'm saying, of course, the dream operates on multiple levels, right? He was going to rise up out of the fire

Alex Ferrari 56:24
With this inspiration. But he didn't know that at the time.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 56:27
But he himself whether he would have done something called the terminator or something else. His dream was showing him you can rise up after being fired easy. What he did, which is super, is he took that and he became very, very creative with it.

Alex Ferrari 56:44
He drew it, yeah, because he was an artist. So he drew the Terminator.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 56:48
Twilight series came from a dream. There's so many things that came from dream, not only in that kind of thing, but also insulin as a cure for diabetes. Beethoven used to compose music for instruments that he had dreamed that don't exist. We have so much creative inspiration inside of ourself. And the really big question is, are we going to do something with it? And like that little juicy time period that's not quite awake and not quite asleep, it's so important, and it's that dreaming while awake, kind of space where so many ideas come to us, most people recognize that time. It's the same default network that kicks in at that time that is responsible for dreaming, that's responsible for the imagination and so many other things in our mind. Most people recognize that time in the shower, like many people tell me, oh yeah, I've been in the shower and then all of a sudden, boom, that idea and I knew how to solve that problem. Same it's when we actually get really quiet and just daydream and relax into something that we become a font of ideas like meditation, yeah, it happens a lot. But what's so great about, you know, the creativity of dreaming is James had that dream and he did the Terminator with it. Who knows what anybody else who had had that dream would have done with it themselves, a million different creative things could have come from that, right? The important thing is that something came from it. You know how many great ideas are not part of the world because people aren't paying attention to their dreams or getting curious about that

Alex Ferrari 58:32
They're afraid of moving forward? Yeah? Which is, is unfortunate. And that's the other thing that too, that I'm not sure how, if this works in dreams or not, but this kind of phenomenon of two people around the world from different parts of the world thinking of the exact same idea at the exact same time, yeah, so Alexander going Bell was actually given the credit for creating the telephone, but There was another dude in for, I think it was, might have been France, I'm not sure, happens all the time, that he actually, like, he actually trademarked it earlier, like, by like a day or two. It was crazy, yeah, but he did it in Europe and he did an American so it's just, it happens all the time.

Alex Ferrari 58:33
Same with REM sleep that was discovered in France and in the US simultaneously,

Alex Ferrari 58:39
And then also like, well, I hear that. I've heard this from Spielberg. I've heard this from Michael Jackson Prince, that Spielberg once said, he's like, yeah, when dreams come, or a dream comes, or an idea flows in, if I don't move on it, it goes to the next and he's like, and then all of a sudden, six months later, you're like, oh, James Cameron's making that movie. So James Cameron was supposed to do Jurassic Park. I don't know if you knew that or No, I did not. James Cameron, he lost, he basically lost the opportunity to Jurassic Park by four hours. Oh, Spielberg signed it for. Four hours before James they both had interesting. They both under they both knew Michael Crichton. They both read the script of the book The thing, yeah, and Spielberg jumped on it four hours earlier, interesting, and James lost it, and he's like, thank God, because ours would mines would have been like aliens. It would have been a much scarier. So I'm so glad Steven got it, but that's was so fascinating, and that happens all the time. I think the famous story was with Michael Jackson. It was Michael Jackson or Prince, one of the I think it was, yeah, it was Prince. Prince was infamous for just making music anytime in the night. Wow. And he has, I think we have enough Prince music in his vault to release a brand new album every year into the year, 3000 like, that's how many 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of unreleased songs. Wow. There's a guy who's just sitting there and cataloging, and it's insane. But he would call up his like, backup singers and say, Hey, I need you to come in the studio. But, but Prince is three o'clock in the morning. Can we wait three hours now to come in? Like, can we finish sleeping? No, no, no, no, if I don't write this down and record down and record it now, Michael Jackson's gonna take it from me,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:01:05
Really. That's super interesting.

Alex Ferrari 1:01:07
That's the way he he was thinking. Like, my this idea came to me, if I don't grab it and own it, it's gonna go somewhere else. So that happens through dreams as well.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:01:16
Yeah, would you agree? We, yeah, we, we pick up on, you know, thoughts have form, the ether, the ether, but thoughts have form. You know, the the movement of being inspired is an energy. The moment it becomes a thought, it takes on a certain kind of form. And what Prince is talking about, or was talking about, is then taking that form and making it really tangible. I have to write this song, and I have to do it right now, and that's the thing, too. I'm glad you're talking about this, because I might have a dream that could really change and shift and move my life. But if I dismiss it, is not going to be and that's the thing people always say, Well, if I dream it, it's going to just come to pass. Not necessarily. We have to do the hard work. We have to bring it into actual material, tangible form.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:17
Would you agree that, let's say a a quantum physics, uh, equation will not come into my mind to solve, you know, string theory, because I'm not the person to accept that kind of idea, because I wouldn't know what to do with it. Just like someone who's not an artist or created that Terminator dream would just have been a nightmare. It could have been related as a nightmare would have just been dismissed, but because it was given to the right person who has the right skill set, it's able to come into the world. Does that make sense?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:02:50
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, not only that speaks to that beautiful thing of how subjective each of us are our subjectively constructed life. And back to this word purpose, so being open to what I can bring through and carry into this life. For me, that's purpose. And I really want to underline that, because there's a lot of people today who feel sort of paralyzed or stagnant because there's so many changes happening so fast, and it's like, you know, I'm going to put my head in the sand because it's too much. And when you ask someone you know to like, well, you can engage. You can start doing different things and any little thing, but be open to I might be the person to just bring big love into the world that's also needed, and that is something that our dreams also do. They remind us of our capacity to love, to step over these places of paralysis or these places of cynicism. There's so much cynicism these days, our dreams can remind us that big love is really possible, and that shifts everything.

Alex Ferrari 1:04:10
How can we use dreams to really be our problem solvers in our life, our mirrors in our life, our therapists in our life. Like, how can we consciously do that? Because, again, it still sounds a lot of passiveness, meaning like it's happening to us, as opposed to us creating an intention before we go to sleep. I have this problem. I if you guys can help me, if you want to talk it to us as a team or something, but I or the universe, or whatever you want to call it like, can you send me help? Can I get help in this problem I'm having or I feel stuck? What should I do those kind of things? Is there a way in the way you teach that we can use dreams to act actively, help us?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:04:55
Absolutely and so it really starts, and it's my second reminder to you, Alex. Of getting a dream notebook, get a journal. Because if we start asking the universe to give us something, it's going to and so we have to have a journal to catch it. It's so important because if I disregard my inner self talking to me. Or if I, you know, say, Oh yes, I'd like to have, you know, this phone call come in, and then I never turn my phone on, it's going to start to then set up this idea of, yeah, I asked, but nothing ever came to me. And that creates, also cynicism. That's a self created problem. So if I'm going to have a curiosity about something, I really want to understand and break out of a pattern, like someone said to me the other day, of always dating the same guy that ends in conflict. Okay, that's great. It's already a first step. I recognize there's a pattern. Super if I now want to ask my dreams to help me with that, I have to be open to receiving what my dreams Tell me. And that means getting a dream journal, writing it down, and then after I've written it down, being really curious about, you know, that thing you're talking about. Of, you know, do I have the courage to face myself get really curious, like, what are the hard questions this dream is trying to get me to pay attention to and can I start walking through my waking time, letting these questions kind of roll around in my mind and see where I'm doing some of these things and how I can shift it

Alex Ferrari 1:06:39
In your research, have you come across ancient teachings about dreams, and have you studied those like the Vedic side or the Eastern philosophy, or just any culture in ancient times who talked about dreams, because it's been going on since we've been human.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:06:56
So what I teach is an ancient lineage of dreams, and it originated in the 13th century, two rabbis of the Mediterranean. And it's a cabbalistic, rooted way of looking at dreams and our inner, spontaneous imagery. And Kabbalah is a word that means to receive. And one of the questions that this approach to dreaming asks is receive what and how. So it's about learning to look inside ourself and have those revelatory and by revelatory again, it could just be so simple as, oh, I'm I'm causing myself to trip and stumble because I've got this pattern or whatever, but that inner revelatory experience and being able to then do something with that experience in waking time,

Alex Ferrari 1:07:59
Have you in your travels. Have you been able? Have you seen other Have you studied other dream ideas in the ancient times and other cultures, how they preach, how they approach dreaming and and what they say about dreaming?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:08:12
I mean, I've had, you know, sort of cursory touches with that, but what I'm talking about here, in this lineage, I studied it deeply, deeply intensely for about 10 years with one teacher, and about 10 more with another. And it's so rich and so full of information. You talked about people looking to the east for meditative, reflective practices. But it's also in our western esoteric tradition. And, you know, Judaism gave rise to Christianity, and later, Islam kind of came from that same

Alex Ferrari 1:08:50
Abrahamic, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:08:52
So for me, you know, it's, it's interesting to look at, what are some of the foundations of the Western esoteric tradition that this comes from?

Alex Ferrari 1:09:07
That's also interesting, yeah, because it's that it's been muffled a lot in the West. Yeah, the West has not looked into the spiritual. Is not looking to the esoteric, from the the Essenes to who are the ones, the mystics in Islam, the Sufi Sufis, the Sufis Cabal, all these kind of mystic aspects of the Western it just kind of quieted it down. And I know it's pretty interesting how it's worked, because back in the Roman times, I mean, the Delphi, the Oracle of Delphi, all that they were much more into the esoteric, they were much more into the spirit. They were much more into those kind of things. But as time went on, it seemed to like we lose track of it. The East kept it for a lot of a lot of those years, but it's fascinating to see how it all kind of shook out.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:09:58
Well, it kind of took. A hard left with the Age of Enlightenment, which was not so enlightened. And

Alex Ferrari 1:10:06
What is the age of enlightenment

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:10:08
That sort of came parallel with philosophy, Descartes and industrialization, people in Europe began to get super fascinated with clock making. And yeah, they are and making a sort of deciding that the human body was a mechanism as well, and mechanizing everything. And we're still living this idea that we're just mechanical, and we've lost that sense of wholeness.

Alex Ferrari 1:10:38
Well, yeah, I mean the medical field in general, it's like, you walk into a doctor, and it's like, I can cut you open or prescribe something to you, and it's all like, this or this. But they never look at the underlining, more holistic purpose of what's causing all of this. Yeah, they look, they look at the body very much as a machine, and it is, to a certain extent, but there's so much more it is, and it's not exactly it is and it is not. It's so much more.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:11:02
Here's a great story.

Alex Ferrari 1:11:04
Tell me.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:11:06
Gene Achterberg wrote a book called shamanism and healing, or imagery and healing, shamanism, healing, something like that. And in it such a fantastic story. There's a guy who was in a hospital bed and he had a heart problem, and his eyes were closed. The doctor comes in, you know, with all these residents in tow, thinks he's asleep, pulls up his chart, looks at it, and says he has a galloping heart, puts the chart back in, leaves. Six months later, the guy who was in the bed, hospital bed, shows up for an appointment with this doctor. This doctor was shocked, because in medical parlance, a galloping heart means that's it, like he's out of here. He comes in, the doctor's like, hi, you know. And he said, I just wanted to see you and thank you, because as soon as I knew I heard you say, you have a galloping heart, I knew how strong my heart was, like a horse, and I knew I'd be okay.

Alex Ferrari 1:12:04
Wow, yeah, yeah. Then it's like, no, it's not I meant at all. You're supposed to be dead.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:12:10
Well, hopefully,

Alex Ferrari 1:12:10
But that's the Oh god. What's the effect I'm losing placebo,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:12:23
But it's the effect of our inner imagery as a healing system, correct? That's what I'm talking about with dreams, our inner imagery. So dreaming is really the language of our experience, and all these things that we're experiencing is put into form, and if that form is, say, the image of, you know, the person who's blasting the stadium, I can shift it, I can correct it. But that image, and even from a the standpoint of cognitive neuropsychology, images our blueprint for action. We have an image, and then later we have thought. So if we start working with thought, we're a step removed, and then we have to get to image and then changing the physical system. But here with dreaming, there's a physical system and an image which is the action point. So if we work with that image and we shift that image, then it shifts my action point. Forget about thought. Thought is is sluggish compared to what is possible for us to do.

Alex Ferrari 1:13:38
I think, I think the core idea of this conversation for people to understand is that we have so much more power within ourselves.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:13:45
We have all the tools we need to solve our own problems.

Alex Ferrari 1:13:48
And that's terrifying to a lot of people, because they've never been told that before. Yeah, they've been told that everything's outside of you, but this body can heal itself, this mind can heal itself, and there are tools that are inside of us that we just are not even aware of or have ignored or rejected because of whatever programming or trauma or things that we've dealt with. But I think hopefully that people listening to this conversation will understand that we have all the power within us, and dreams are just another tool to do things like that,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:14:21
Yeah. And by the way, I do believe that all of that you use the phrase outer programming, is part of our job on this planet, absolutely, to experience it, get stuck by it, and then overcome it. Because it's like, you know, it's really like a pearl. It's that irritation that causes us to do something and refine and hone ourself, because really, as humans, we're all couch potatoes. We're like the cats. We just want to, like, lay around, and many of us do, yeah and not put a lot of effort into doing things. And so. That sledgehammer. You talked about, that pain point when it's like, if I keep laying on the couch, it's just gonna get worse and worse. We finally get to that pain point where it's like, Okay, I'm gonna make changes. And so part of our own becoming is overcoming getting stuck.

Alex Ferrari 1:15:20
Well, I mean, and you know, my my understanding, after all the research I've done, is that on the spiritual side, is that we choose who we come in, as we choose what we do, where we come in, what country we come in, the time we come in, the parents. We have all of that, because it's part of the things that we need to learn along this way. But even if you don't want to even go down the spiritual and just go, stay practical and you only live one life. Let's say, without all of that programming, you don't have a journey. You need you like you had to go through all the stuff you went through. I had to go through all the stuff I went through to get to where we are today. Totally. That's who made us. That's what made us, is all the experiences and the things that we had to overcome. But without that muck that gets thrown on us, and sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not, but whatever that is, it's who we are,

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:16:07
Yeah, and it's actually interesting for the most part, because it's a life is an adventure, it is. And sure, there's some difficult times and then there's some great times, but I think about it as an adventure, because, you know, I've traveled around the world and done different things, and when I come home from these travels, what's really exciting to tell people is, oh, and then we landed on this strip in the middle of the highlands in Papua, New Guinea, and there was a storm and this was happening. Those are the parts that we tell people. We don't say, Oh yeah, my plane was on time, and that's boring.

Alex Ferrari 1:16:46
Oh, I agree with you 100% as a friend of mine told me once, it was very profound statement. She's like, when you die, you'll remember the vacations you took, the time you spent with your family, time you spent with your friends, the good times, those things, that's what you're going to remember. You're not going to remember the other stuff. When you're on your way out, you're not thinking about all the negative stuff. You're you're trying to recap all the great stuff. And those experiences are what really make a good, fulfilling life. As many of those experiences as you can. Maybe it's not always traveling, but whatever that is, those fun things are what you're going to remember. And it's so true.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:17:26
And what makes them fun sometimes is that was challenging, and we got over it. I mean, that really did happen to me. We were going into in this, you know, plane into the Papua New Guinea Highlands, and had to divert because there were two groups of Papua, New Guinean people who decided to use that landing strip as to fight each other. Oh, lovely. Yeah, lovely. So, you know, it's exciting. These things are exciting.

Alex Ferrari 1:17:53
Oh no. I mean, the adventures, when you go traveling, the adventures they come up, you're like, oh yeah. We were in the middle of, you know, Spain, somewhere, and we walked into this place and, oh, my God. And isn't that like? It's just it's visceral. It's visceral on those kind of adventures life. It's about adventure. It is and to just bring it all the way back to dreams. Dreams are a way to show you where you can go, and it can give you ideas. It can guide you. It can help you heal. It is a very powerful, powerful tool and gift that we, all, every one of us, have. You don't have to be educated, you don't have to be rich, you don't have to be poor. It happens to all of us

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:18:32
Can do it, all of us, all by yourself, for yourself, and you start to pay attention to it.

Alex Ferrari 1:18:37
Bonnie I'm gonna ask you a few questions ask all my guests, yeah, what is your definition of living a fulfilled life?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:18:44
For me, it's what we've been talking about, of being able to be my true self, and what that means in the really small ways, being able to really be present with other people, be present to what's happening in the world around me, the you know, very beautiful butterfly that 10 people blazed past because they're in such a hurry. But I see it as being able to love fully. That's fulfilling to me.

Alex Ferrari 1:19:12
If you had a chance to go back in time and speak to little Bonnie, what advice would you give her?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:19:18
I don't know that I need to go back in time. It's all just part of the journey. I might just say, have fun.

Alex Ferrari 1:19:26
Now, if little Bonnie could speak to you today, what advice would she give you?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:19:30
Keep going. Keep going. Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 1:19:33
How do you define God, Source, Divine? How do you define that?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:19:37
I think it's better to not define that.

Alex Ferrari 1:19:41
Simple as that, what is love?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:19:43
Also not something that we need to define. We feel it. We know it, and it becomes tangible. And moments of kindness and reaching out to other people, being present to people,

Alex Ferrari 1:19:57
If you can talk to the Divine, if you could ask the Divine One question. What would it be?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:20:01
I don't know that I need to ask that question. I'm so you know that is one hallmark of dreamers, is just being open. I don't need to know. I just want to experience.

Alex Ferrari 1:20:14
And in your opinion, what is the ultimate purpose of life?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:20:17
To really be present to our experience and to love fully.

Alex Ferrari 1:20:21
And where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing in the world?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:20:25
So you can come we have classes, and we do one on one work with people. That's institutefordreamingandimagery.com. You can find out more about the book at bonniebuckner.com either of those two places, you can send us an email. We'll get back in touch with you. Follow us on Instagram. Dream with i, i, d, i or bonniebuckner.com with it all spelled out.

Alex Ferrari 1:20:51
And do you have any parting messages for the audience?

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:20:54
Get a dream journal. That's my third reminder, Alex, get a dream journal. Just start to write your dreams and just get curious.

Alex Ferrari 1:21:03
Bonnie has been a pleasure talking to you. I'm gonna go dream tonight. I'll start writing some stuff down as I come out, but I I do appreciate you and everything you have been helping to do to awaken the planet. So thank you.

Dr. Bonnie Buckner 1:22:39
Thank you. Thanks for having me.