What Your Dreams Are Telling You in Midlife — with Dream Expert Bonnie Buckner l EP36

Dream expert and imagery therapist Bonnie Buckner — author of The Secret Mind — reveals why our nightly dreams are one of the most powerful, freely available tools for navigating midlife change. Drawing on neuroscience and ancient wisdom traditions, she shows how the brain's imagination network is more active during dreaming than during everyday tasks, and how reading your dreams can illuminate what your waking mind is too busy to hear. If you're navigating a career pivot, questioning old patterns, or craving a deeper connection to your inner knowing, the answers you're searching for may already be speaking to you every night.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Your creativity crisis started in childhood. Researchers call it the "fourth grade slump" — when social norms kick in and imagination contracts. A dream practice rebuilds that creative muscle nightly.
• Dreaming is a workout for your brain. The imagination network is more cognitively active than the task-focused executive network. Bonnie calls it "going to the gym for our brains."
• Technology is stealing your dreams. Scrolling before bed floods your nervous system — and shows up as nightmares. Create a tech-free buffer ritual before sleep to protect your dream life.
• Dreams are an early warning system. One client dreamed of a car speeding toward a gaping hole — a perfect mirror of her unsustainable workload. The dream gave her the clarity to stop.
• The feeling is the message. Don't Google it. Stay with the emotional residue a dream leaves behind — you can talk yourself out of anything logically, but not out of something you've genuinely felt.

Links & Resources

•Bonnie Buckner’s website: bonniebuckner.com, 

Classes: Institute for Dreaming and Imagery,
Instagram: Bonnie Buckner

Transcript

The Midlife Awakening (00:00)
Welcome back to the Midlife Awakening podcast with Adelia. That's me, the podcast for women who are done sleepwalking through their lives and ready to wake up to who they truly are. I'm so glad that you're here today because this conversation might just change how you spend the first 15 minutes every morning. And honestly, it might change everything. We talk a lot on the show about tools that help us go inward, things like astrology, intuition, self-awareness. But today we're going somewhere even deeper.

we are going into the dream world. My guest is Bonnie Buckner. She is the founder of the International Institute of Dreaming and Imagery. She works with individuals, leads workshops and coaches company executives and their teams on how to use dreams as tools to guide us and solve some of our biggest challenges. She is also an imagery therapist and author of The Secret Mind, Unlock the Power of Dreams to Transform Your Life.

Bonnie has been working with the language of dreams and inner imagery for decades, drawing on ancient wisdom traditions including the Qabbalah of light. And what she shares in this conversation is genuinely unlike anything I've heard before. Now you may be thinking, what the heck does dream work have to do with midlife and what I'm currently going through? Well, you may be pleasantly surprised when you listen to this episode as Bonnie talks about how we can actually use dream work to not only navigate our lives daily,

but also to recapture who we actually are. And isn't that one of the biggest struggles that we have during midlife? The question, who am I actually? Well, in your dream world, it's you and just you, the unedited version just waiting to be discovered. And who knows you better than the deepest parts of yourself? We also talk about why so many of us are living in a creativity crisis. And if you were someone that was discouraged from being creative like I was,

and encouraged to follow a traditional career path, then this is your permission to tap back into that part of yourself. We explore the neuroscience of dreaming and how your nightly dreams are one of the most powerful and completely free tools for midlife reinvention that you already have access to.

If you've ever woken up from a dream that left you with a feeling you just couldn't shake, if you're someone who thinks you don't dream at all, if you've ever wondered what your recurring dreams are trying to tell you, or if you're in that place so many of us find ourselves in a midlife, knowing something needs to change but you're not quite sure what that is, this episode is going to land for you. Whether you're Googling how to reconnect with yourself in midlife,

what your dreams mean during a life transition or simply how to tap into your intuition more deeply, you are in exactly the right place. Let's dive in. Here is my conversation with the wonderful Bonnie.

Odilia|The Midlife Awakening (02:47)
Welcome to the Midlife Awakening podcast. I'm your host, Odilia. This is a podcast about transformation for women who are waking up to who they really are while navigating everything that comes with midlife. And I want you to know I'm on this journey right alongside you.

This is the show where we explore everything from the spiritual tools that can help us in our daily practices to healing modalities that we can use to heal what we've been carrying for so long to the everyday midlife topics that a midlife woman faces like perimenopause, finances, career changes, and so much more. Each week we go deeper into what it means to heal, to awaken, and to finally become the most authentic version of yourself. I'm so glad that you found your way here.

The Midlife Awakening (03:36)
Hi, Bonnie. Welcome to the Midlife Awakening podcast. I'm so glad that you could join me today and I'm really excited for this conversation.

Bonnie Buckner (03:41)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here today.

The Midlife Awakening (03:45)
So you've written a book called The Secret Mind, which on the surface looks like a book about dreams and mostly is, but you open the book talking about creativity, which I found really interesting, and you describe that we have a creativity crisis. why is creativity so important in how we think and how we live day to day?

Bonnie Buckner (04:05)
Creativity is everything, you know, we tend to sort of think about creativity as being Mozart, Picasso, know, Kurt Cobain. And we forget that every single choice we make has some kind of creativity behind it. I mean, we are the creative creators of our life path and our life choice. And if we're not actively,

You know, focusing on that, we can default to pattern and just replicating things that for one reason or another, we feel like it's safer. It's, safer in the sense of, it's better to keep my job rather than sort of stretching myself and taking on a new challenge, or it's safer in the sense of, you know, my partner or my parents, my family is going to understand me, but if I stretch myself, they won't.

So for these different reasons, we tend to sort of pull back our creativity instead of exercising it. And we're all meant to continue to unfold in our lifetimes. And this is about midlife. And I was reflecting on this earlier today about when I was a child, I used to look at some adults and I would think, my gosh, life must get really boring.

And I would just see them doing the same thing day in and day out. And I thought I could never do that. I could never just, you know, plug into something at a certain point in my life and, replicate that without having other things. And maybe it's not to do with the job. Maybe it's having different hobbies and different things, but that constant exploration of this very vibrant life that we get to live is.

Also, what gives us meaning?

The Midlife Awakening (05:51)
Absolutely, and I think you cite in the book you're about eight or nine that there's sort of a slump. And that's really interesting because do we come out of that? Some people come out of that, not really. Most people don't, right? Because we all sort of, you do an interesting illustration where you draw a circle and

Bonnie Buckner (05:56)
Yeah, they call it the fourth grade slump.

They do.

The Midlife Awakening (06:11)
You make the point that kids would see a tiger's eye or a porthole or a tiger's cave, but adults would just see a circle or a circle on a white page.

Bonnie Buckner (06:19)
Right.

And we actually, we do come out of the fourth grade slump and there's been a lot of, and you you cited it more correctly about the age because there's different grades in different countries, but it's pretty across the board in every country that this has been tested that we have a dip in our creativity around the time that we begin to learn social norms. So there's this, you know, pulling back this,

wanting to, you know, fit in that happens. And so some people continue to, really grow their creativity. And, know, we're talking in a broad way, there's many different ways of measuring creativity. We're specifically talking about the Torrance test, which measures it in multiple different ways and looks at like 13 different creativity strengths. And so.

As adults, we excel in certain things that younger people don't, but in general, and this is the work of a researcher named Kim who's looked at the scores of Torrance tests for the last several decades and seen that since the 1990s, creativity has been dropping, particularly in the U.S. And there's a lot of postulations of why that is. There's been a lot

more emphasis placed on math and science and less on the arts programs. However, obviously there's a lot of creativity in science and in math, particularly when you get to higher levels. They've postulated that it has to do with more and more technology use with multiple question kind of tests. There's a whole host of reasons of why.

And the problem with that really in the very big picture, we started talking about it in terms of our own personal life and how we continue to make our life meaningful for ourselves. But also we're living in a world in which there's a lot of problems that we need to solve. And if we don't get really creative and imaginative about how to do that, we'll just end up replicating.

what we already have.

The Midlife Awakening (08:27)
Yeah, and I think you made an important point in the book where you talked about climate change, for example. Younger people, they just now feel hopeless. There's no problem solving going on. And it's linked back to the creativity decline that we've seen.

Bonnie Buckner (08:42)
It can be yes. the thing is, dreaming is my thing that is my, my expertise. And there's many, many reasons why dreaming is for me so utterly important today is one reason is every single night, if I'm aware of my dreams, I'm

experiencing a completely different world, where I remain the agent, the I in that world, moving through it, making decisions. And so I emerge the next day changed in some way. And night after night after night of

During the day, I have one life. During the night, I go to sleep and I'm in a completely different world with completely different rules and I navigate those rules. And then I wake up to a waking time that has different situations over and over and over. I'm building that creative muscle, that ability to look at things from multiple perspectives, to be flexible. Ruth Richards is a creativity researcher who has talked about

In the workplace, why creativity is not fostered. And part of the reason creativity is not fostered is because it's disruptive. It causes us to look at things differently. And a lot of people feel like, Ooh, I don't open that out. It'll mean extra work for me. I mean, I might have to reconfigure things. So if we're used to doing this and we become much more flexible and fluid because of our dreaming practice, then

We're more accepting of those kinds of disruptions in our healthy disruptions and the workplace.

The Midlife Awakening (10:21)
And you make a really interesting neurological link in the book between creativity and dreaming, saying that it's they both are using the same system, the default network. And you go into detail explaining the default network and the executive network, one being the default network being your imagination, being able to self reflect. And the executive network is where we, you know, the pinging of the phone, I think you were talking about in the book.

You know, technology comes in tasks, things to do. And that changes everything about how we think about dreams and how important it is because in that rest space, we're able to then self-reflect on whatever it is we've been dealing with in our lives, which is so important.

Bonnie Buckner (11:02)
Yeah. And that rest space is actually more active in terms of what is happening in our cognitive processing in our brain than the executive network. So when we're imagining we're actually more cognitively, active, could say, then we are when we're, you know, adding up numbers, working on QuickBooks, whenever that task might be, it's essential.

And what else is essential is that functional connectivity. So ideally the executive network draws from the imaginations of the default network are dreaming, are imagining, are envisioning, and it executes it. Like it puts it into place and brings it into fruition. And that crosstalk between the two,

some research is coming out that it's not always as strong as they would like it to be. And that can be associated with overuse of the executive executive network, overuse of technology. bringing more dreaming into our lives is like,

I mean, I call it going to the gym for our brains because it really helps to strengthen that functional connectivity so that we're using more of ourselves, more of our cognition.

The Midlife Awakening (12:22)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you describe it really well in the book where you can see that there's this interplay between the two and that's really, really important. when you were three years old and you were suffering from your own series of nightmares. Can you tell us a little bit about that story? And because it's quite extraordinary.

Bonnie Buckner (12:37)
I had a moment. It is true when I was three, that I had had many nightmares and I was just reflecting on it as a kid would reflect on it thinking, you know, I'm just going to never sleep again. You know, whatever, how can I do that? Can I jump up and down? Can I do jumping jacks? How do I not sleep again?

And as I was kind of going through these different thoughts in my mind of what dreaming even is, and it just kind of hit me, I have to figure out how to, I'm going to sleep again and I don't know what sleep is. don't know what comes after dreams and all that. So I just have to figure it out and I have to figure out how to, you know, change, transform my nightmare somehow. And it just sort of.

I got it that that's what I'm going to do. That's what I'm going to do here as an adult. That's my life's work.

I did different things growing up and, and had, as everybody has a quite, you know, curvy path to get to doing this now.

The Midlife Awakening (13:41)
And then years later, you literally dream who your teachers, you're handed off to your teacher in a dream, isn't it? And the linear to that, you know, work in it. And has that continued throughout your life? Has the dreams helped navigate you into your next step?

Bonnie Buckner (13:56)
I use dreams for everything I do. And it's become such a part of me that it's not even necessarily the extraordinary dreams, although I have had extraordinary dreams where it's like, wow, this is a big marker. Like there's going to be a shift in this. But it's also, and this is really important for creativity, I extend the time between

waking up and actually getting up. And so, you know, I don't turn off the alarm and jump up and go make coffee. I lay there, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes. And so I make sure I wake up in time to be able to do this. And I have my dream journal next to me and I just let my mind float. I'm not really awake yet. I'm still kind of playing with whatever last dream is in my mind and

Somehow every day that I do this, I have some kind of insight into work that I'm doing or work that I want to do. And I've had, you know, certain realizations in that time. so it's, it's being able to slide into that. And they would call this in scientific research, they call it different names, names you and I would call it mind wandering.

is a very common name. And I do, I just let my mind wander and in that space. And then I capture the sort of insights that are coming up.

The Midlife Awakening (15:24)
when I read that part in the book where you talk about just lingering, because I think it's you're talking about where people believe that some people believe that they can't recall their dreams or they don't dream. so I tried that. I did that a couple of times where I woke up and I just I let it in because I was like, it was a really weird dream because I'm quite an active dreamer. I was like, that was a really weird dream. And I just let it like 10 minutes. I was just

Bonnie Buckner (15:36)
Yeah.

The Midlife Awakening (15:47)
what happened in that dream. I was just, and I was able to, because I struggle with remembering my dream, even though I'm a very active dreamer, I struggle with remembering a lot of my dream. And sometimes my dreams are quite profound or prophetic. And so I just lingered with that and I was like, let's try this. And it really did work. It really did. Like I just gave my brain the chance to, you know, go there and think about what just happened. What did I just dream about? And writing it down.

So I really love that you put that in the book because I always thought to myself, how do I, how can I recall my dreams because I just get so stuck and I can't remember what I've dreamed. And I know it was something important or something in profound because you do talk about that in the book where you say that dreams are unfolding. Right. It's not just about the interpretation of the dream. I think a lot of us try and just try and interpret what exactly do we see. It's really just an unfolding.

Bonnie Buckner (16:42)
It is. I just, you know, I, first of all, that's awesome that you tried that. And I'm really glad that that produced some fruit for you. And I just want to say too, you know, it's incredible the amount of, capacities and capabilities that we have that we shortcut because of the modern world.

And I'm talking about not sleeping enough. I'm talking about having that very tight thing where we don't go to bed in time so that we're definitely not going to get up early enough to let ourselves mind wander. We jump up or late. These are very, they're cheating us out of our full ability to, bring ourselves to whole new places.

So bravo to you for giving that a shot. It's really fantastic. hope all your listeners do that. We're so capable. And one of the things that I like to say is we have within us all of the tools we need to solve our own problems. And

When we spend the time to look at our dreams and not try and fix them with an interpretation, not try and go out to a Google or a dream dictionary and try and plug into a one size fits all, but really take the time to pay attention to our own inner self and what our own inner self is telling us. We find we're so much more capable than we think that we are.

The Midlife Awakening (18:10)
yes, absolutely. so I wanted to ask you about technology because I know you talk about this in the book and how it impacts our sleep. So we've just been talking about what we do when we wake up, but you talk a lot about what you should be doing before you go to sleep and how technology can impact that. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how we can adjust our routines to promote that good sleep and that

ability to dream in terms of technology.

Bonnie Buckner (18:36)
Yeah. You know, I've been talking a bit recently about dreams and in the Q and a's with audiences. A lot of people are telling me that they're having nightmares right now. And you know, there's a lot going on in the world. And my question back to them is, are you looking at your phones right before you go to bed? when we.

are just sitting in bed and we're scrolling through bad news. We don't turn that off. And this is also a sign to all of us about how disconnected we've become to our own bodies and just this immersion in news and posts and things like this. We're not giving ourselves time to register that we're having a physical

bodily response to all of these different things, whether it's good news things or bad news things, because we're just scrolling from post to post to post to post post. And we're not allowing ourselves to catch up. Our bodies are trying to process all this information and we're not helping it to do so.

So what I recommend to people and what I definitely do for me is to make a technology buffer, make some time between when you finish being on the phone, computer, iPad, whatever, and when you decide to go to sleep and do something different, whatever that is, have a cup of tea, do a little meditation, do a little journaling, whatever it is, just have a space that

clears the palette, let's say, before going to sleep. And, you know, I do recommend to try and limit that as much as possible. I mean, I'm definitely online just as anybody else is because that's how we communicate with each other. But we can be selective about what it is that we're consuming online.

The Midlife Awakening (20:30)
absolutely. And I think I've done sort of like a technology cleanup in that I don't, I don't watch the news. I get my information from the people I talk to every day, but I, I don't even have a TV anymore because I just don't want to take that information in. Yeah. And I do a gratitude practice before I go to sleep, which I've found has been really wonderful. been doing that since December and it's just really nice to go to sleep on some good thoughts.

Bonnie Buckner (20:41)
Yes.

same.

The Midlife Awakening (20:56)
So that's something that I do, which I think is, and you prescribe in your book a very specific dream practice. So you tell the reader to get a journal, but a very specific dream journal. Do you want to talk us a little bit about that? Cause you're quite specific. Because some people might want to use the notes on their phone to, to record their dreams. So, but I thought you had something really important on that you'd like to share.

Bonnie Buckner (21:20)
Yeah, I would love to. There's a few reasons I talk about the journal. first of all, intention is everything. If we want to remember our dreams, we have to have the intention to remember our dreams and we make good on that intention by getting a journal, getting ourselves set up to remember them, to capture them. And there's a thing about

going out and finding a journal you really love and all those blank pages and holding the journal in your hands that becomes a very tactile set apart thing. We use our phones for everything. We use our phones to pay bills. We use our phones to talk to people, getting a journal that is its own thing already sets apart a dreaming practice. And

Once we have that journal, we're excited to write in it. We're excited to do something with it. And then putting a pen in it and writing down the dream. you wake up, you're going to get the full dream and all of the ways that it wants to come out. Sometimes maybe it's drawing an image. This happens to me with clients all the time. They draw something and then they send me a picture of it and said, I don't know why I drew this, but I put it in the margin.

I was writing down my dreams or a very purposeful misspelling. And none of these things can be captured by a phone app or it'll spell check and correct it. And we'll not even realize that it had been changed because you know, we're kind of doing it in a sleepy state capturing all these things. Dreams love puns. They love to take things that we're used to seeing one way and turn it around in a different way.

⁓ that's part of the drawings. So being able to be direct in that way and not putting it in something that we use all the time. And that's going to change our way of, of writing it down is really important. think.

The Midlife Awakening (23:11)
Yeah, I love that. The way you explained it was really impactful because I was just thinking, I'll just type it into my phone. And when I read that piece, I was like, I see. There's more to it. There's more to the ritual than just putting it on your phone. And then again, you mentioned that you're then just activating that executive network in your brain again. And so now we're moving out of the default network that we really want to be in for that process.

Bonnie Buckner (23:28)
Exactly.

Exactly, it wakes us up.

The Midlife Awakening (23:37)
Yeah, yeah. And you also say, write down everything, no matter how absurd. And I really love this because I've had some dreams which have been really absurd. And I love this where you're saying, that's your dream spaces where you're allowed to be completely absurd. you know, even no matter how embarrassing it is, why does it matter so much that we don't edit ourselves and we write everything down, no matter how absurd it is?

Bonnie Buckner (23:59)
Well, first of all, what may seem absurd to us, to the dream, it's not at all. It's getting our attention. So getting our attention is a huge, important part of dreaming. We run through our days at full speed and barely take the time to reflect on anything. And dreams give us that reflection, but they're always going to give us that reflection with just

A little difference because it catches our attention. That's why nightmares are so important because they capture our attention. They literally wake us up. So having that, little difference, you know, misspelling of a word or some kind of weird image or something that seems so embarrassing is a great way of saying, Hey, I really want you to pay attention to this. And then the second part of that is.

how wonderful to learn how to not edit ourselves, period. I can't tell you the number of people who've come to me who really want to make a big change in their life. And maybe it's a career change. Maybe they want to start being more creative in their work, but they're constantly pulling themselves back, editing, editing, not allowing themselves to do that. So you and your dream journal as just you two.

That's the first place to start learning what it is to just take something that's inside you, put it out and let it be without trying to edit, change control, criticize, et cetera.

The Midlife Awakening (25:26)
Yeah,

I really love that. It just gives you a space to be playful, really, right? With the complete absurd and all embarrassing.

Bonnie Buckner (25:32)
Yes.

Absolutely.

The Midlife Awakening (25:35)
You also emphasize the importance of imagery and you talk quite a lot about that in the book, not just in dreams, but in our waking life. Why is imagery so powerful?

Bonnie Buckner (25:44)
images are the basis of action. It's, it's the, it's our body's way of putting into form, the energies and insights and inner knowings that we have, because those things are very, very hard for us to grasp. And even hearing that turn of phrase to grasp, we want something tangible that we can wrap our hands around. So

How do I feel about something? This already starts to be a big question. Someone offers me something, a job or something like this. How do I feel about that? It may be difficult for me to even know how I feel about that. So maybe I start the game of asking other people and then it becomes this, you know, to-do list of, well, I can research this or this, or it's a pros and cons list, but it still doesn't capture how I feel.

feel about that and what I know about that. Do I know that's going to be a good fit for me? Do I know that I'm going to be, invigorated by that, or is it something that's going to bore me? so closing our eyes, looking inside, seeing the image we have for that is a way for us to, understand where we are and how we feel about what's happening to us. And so

That's one part of image and images are the building blocks of dreams. Dreams are composed of images and all of these images are showing us in a very holistic way. It's like a one holistic packet of how I feel, what I know, memories, associations, all in one image. If we take the time to really look.

The Midlife Awakening (27:24)
Yeah. And you also make a point in the book that an image to one person has a completely different meaning to somebody else. Why is that so important for us to understand? And I think this is also where like the dream journals and the dream dictionaries and stuff don't really help because an almond tree, I think you use that as an example in one of the books of one of your clients. An almond tree to me means something completely different to an almond tree for somebody else.

Bonnie Buckner (27:35)
Yeah.

Exactly. We're not symbols. We're living, breathing human beings that have our own lifetime of experiences of very interesting differences in those experiences. Not only do we have, you know, an omen tree for you different from an omen tree for me, but

Everything about that tree is different. How we see it, how it smells to us, if we like how it smells or doesn't when it's blossoming, whether we were sitting under an almond tree and a bee stung us or didn't, whether we harvested or didn't. There's so many things that all go into our inner encyclopedia of ourself. And dreaming draws from that. It draws from all of these memories. And when they talk about dreaming being

pulling from autobiographical memory. They're not just talking about an event. It's talking about in all of the senses, the texture, how I felt. Did I feel small compared to the almond tree? Did I feel, you know, strong compared to it because maybe it was a sapling. How did it smell? How do I feel about almonds? Things I've eaten with almonds. Like all of it goes into my understanding.

which at some point my dreams are gonna draw from and give me an image that I get all at once in the same way that we can go to a museum, we see a painting, we get it somehow all at once, but then, you know, we can write a whole essay to explain it and take a long time to explain it.

The Midlife Awakening (29:23)
Absolutely, absolutely. And you, ⁓ in the book, you talk about seven different categories of dreams. Do you want to give us just a quick, I don't want to give too much away to the readers, but just maybe just a quick roundup of the categories.

Bonnie Buckner (29:36)
Yeah. So there's seven kinds of dreams. And this comes from my dream teacher, Dr. Catherine Schoenberg. you know, they correspond to waking time. If you think about it, there are moments where we have a nightmare, for example, maybe we get a flat tire on the way to, an important appointment, or we have a boss that is unhappy with us. These are kind of nightmare situations and we have

a big emotion around it. You know, we might pull over to the side of the road and kick our tire. And so we have a lot of anger about that, or we may sit there and shock with our boss and then be, you know, quite frightened that we have to hurry up and get everything done in time. That's one kind of waking time experience. And whatever we're living in the day, we're dreaming at night. Whatever we're dreaming at night, we're living in the day is we are one.

person. We don't become a different person at night. We stay the same person and our, our sort of stream of experience of our lifetime is like a river that keeps, keeps rolling through us. And so we have, you know, sort of opposite to that spectrum. have really great moments, moments where we feel super expanded and maybe we fallen in love or maybe there's just this great.

perfect, I'm having one right now, spring day where we can spend a moment smelling the flowers and being with friends. And these super expanded experiences fall into something like a great dream. We get a different kind of message about life and what's possible in life. And so there's different

gradations of the kinds of dreams and they all kind of correspond to different of our waking time experiences as well.

The Midlife Awakening (31:22)
And why is it important to categorise the different types of dreams? Why does that matter?

Bonnie Buckner (31:27)
Well, one way that that matters is some of the dreams fall into a category of unresolved and some fall into a category of resolved. And so if you think about our own health, we have moments where, we're resolved. Everything's great. It's perfect temperature. having a great day. And then we have moments where we're unresolved.

If we get too hot, for example, so we suddenly start sweating to cool ourselves off in that same way. have dreams to signal when we're having a, an acute emotional event. That's a nightmare. It's not just that the tire is flat is that we're all tangled up in that event and we're kicking the tire and very angry and frustrated. That's an alert that is not balanced. And if I'm.

tied up in that kind of an emotional reaction, I don't have at my fingertips, all of my creative capacities to just solve the problem of the tire. So being able to understand what we're dreaming helps us to solve our waking time challenges because sometimes we don't even recognize that we're off balance. I give an example in the book of

The person who's in the car that's got too many people in it. It's going too fast. It's got super loud music. It's dark outside and suddenly there's a gaping hole and they're going to fall in it, crash into it. And so this is an example. Everything is too much. It's just too dark. It's too loud. Too many people too fast. And that kind of imbalance was.

happening in this person's waking time as well. so knowing that, then we can solve for it. This person had no idea because it was all part of the job. I've got to take more appointments. I've got to keep moving. I've got to go on this long, you know, extended work trip with too many heavy late night dinners with clients. Why don't we recognize when we're off balance? Because that's modern life and we just kind of muscle through it.

But dreams can help us to pause and say, wait a minute, I'm headed to a gaping hole and I need to shift something, change something.

The Midlife Awakening (33:42)
Yeah, absolutely love that. And I love that story in the book because it really is how we demonstrates how we get stuck in the day to day and and how dream work can actually help us shift out of that because that person then went back to work and canceled everything, didn't they? And sort of just rebalance themselves and had that not been the dream that they had, had it not been for the dream, they wouldn't have done that and probably would have had to burn out or ⁓

Bonnie Buckner (33:58)
Yeah.

Exactly.

The Midlife Awakening (34:09)
who knows what else. So I love that it's an alarm system that helps us realize that there's something that needs attention in our lives. Now, I'm circling a little bit back to like the work that you do. So you work with clients, you use a system that's derived from ancient wisdom called the Qabbalah of Light, if I'm correct. And

Bonnie Buckner (34:29)
Yes.

The Midlife Awakening (34:29)
So when people are working with you, do they usually come to you because they're stuck with a problem, a specific problem, or is it a dream recurrence? And how do you use dreaming and imagery to help them find their answers?

Bonnie Buckner (34:42)
Yeah. People come to me for different reasons. Some people come to me because they need to make a decision and they just, you know, sometimes if we have a big decision we have to make, there's a lot of noise. And so they want to use their dreams or their inner imagery to understand what's the right decision for them to take. I also have people who come to me who they want to explore.

doing other things, changing their careers, or they may have started a career and they're blocked in some way and they want to overcome that block. And then I also just have people who come to me who want to self develop and it's more of an open ended question mark thing. Maybe they're aware of some patterns in their life that they feel like they need to put some attention towards.

But just in general, they want to grow and explore and dreaming feels like something that is the way they want to do that. Their language. We all have a different language and different sort of path that is interesting to us. And that works for them.

The Midlife Awakening (35:45)
you have some remarkable client stories that you put into the book. What is the shift that you most often see with your clients?

Bonnie Buckner (35:52)
I don't know if there's a most often so much as, know, we tend to, there are moments where we can make tiny little shifts that accumulate to be profound, deep changes in our relationships, our work, and dreams offer us that.

really on a nightly basis, learning how to transform. And every time we do, we're building another basis within ourselves of transformation. So I see people become far, far more creative and fluid in their life choices who often

shift some of the things that they're doing in their life and sort of recapturing things that feel more for them at that stage in their life.

The Midlife Awakening (36:47)
And do you see a lot more people that are in midlife or is it across the board?

Bonnie Buckner (36:51)
It's kind of across the board. I would say most of the people who come to me, if it's like a bell curve, hit between say 32 and 50. So kind of in that sweet spot of having lived in the world for a bit of time and now starting to have some questions and

Also having obtained a certain amount of knowledge about things and wanting to tweak it, shift it, you know, add to it.

The Midlife Awakening (37:22)
Yeah, and I think you get a lot of questions specifically in midlife around career changes because you realize you've maybe been doing something that's not for you, not true to your authentic self, not aligned. And you start asking these questions about, well, if not this, then what? So this would be like a self-development tool to help them sort of figure that out to an extent.

Bonnie Buckner (37:37)
Yeah.

Absolutely. And you know, I remember when I graduated from university and all of these people told me advice and it was always advice that was, what they felt was really solid advice to help a young person to get on their feet.

And I will tell you, my bachelor degree was in communications, radio, television, film, and I wanted to go to Los Angeles and work in the film industry. And this one person sat me down who had graduated like 10 years. He was an alum before me in the same degree. And he sat me down and he gave me this long pitch about why I should go into banking.

And after he finished, said, I understand that you told me that because it seems like the most solid thing, but you have to understand, know absolutely nothing about banking. I'm terrible with numbers. The thing that you think seems solid is something that I would just absolutely fail in. And of that, I'm completely certain. And I found it, you know, an interesting thing that he had.

done this same degree as me, but he himself had chosen banking and, and this wispyness he had. And yet, you know, that urge to tell me to go into banking. So some people do fall into that. They hear great advice from someone who's older and they take it because, know, it's really confusing to graduate from university horribly.

But then as we kind of live our life, it's, it's stopping a minute and saying, hold on, life is an adventure and I'm not doing me. So yeah, it's a great time and dreaming is a great way to recapture who is me. What are the things that make me tick? What are the things that enliven me?

The Midlife Awakening (39:39)
And I think also like in your 20s, you're probably, you're so focused on chasing this, this dream, whatever it is, whether it is something that you actually want or somebody else has told you you want. I feel like by the time you get to 30, I don't know, I had that experience. When you get to 30, you start realizing yourself. You start moving towards that sense of self and what do I want? What's right for me? And I feel like that sort of peaks when you hit midlife, you know.

from 38 onwards, that's what I consider midlife. And I think that sort of peaks and you start asking more questions and the dissatisfaction becomes more intense. Well, that's my experience anyway. So it's really good to know that there are tools and that's why I do the show is so that people can learn about all these tools that are out there that can help them get out of that and get into alignment with who they really are. And this sounds like a really beautiful tool that we all have access to. We just have to learn how to

work with it and cultivate it like you said, like getting enough sleep, shutting off the technology, getting the dream journal. And these are all really easy things that we can do. And it's all you talk in the book about inner knowing and it's it is there we just have to access it.

Bonnie Buckner (40:47)
A lot of people who are looking to find the what is me, tell me they have a dream where they see someone or themselves say writing or doing something that is a love that they have, that they haven't allowed themselves to feel. And they suddenly feel it in a huge three-dimensional way in the dream.

And so they wake up and that felt knowledge, you can't undo that. And it's totally different from having a logical linear conversation, writing, not writing. mean, you can talk yourself out of anything, but the feeling of it and that feeling, and people will often say to me things like, remembered that sense. I remembered the joy, the freedom, the

whatever it was, that's how dreams can help us reconnect to who we really are inside and cut through that noise.

The Midlife Awakening (41:49)
Absolutely, and I think it's so profound, the feeling that we can get from dreams. I know I've had dreams where I've woken up and there's been this profound, undeniable feeling. It's just that your inner knowing sort of kicking in. And that, like you said, logic can't override that. And it's something that we can absolutely follow.

Bonnie Buckner (42:08)
Yeah.

The Midlife Awakening (42:08)
Yeah, so this, I mean, this book was such a wonderful read and I really want to encourage anyone who's interested in dreams, like I'm very interested in dreams, as I mentioned, I'm an avid dreamer. So this was really interesting, a really great read What is your hope that people will take away from this book

Bonnie Buckner (42:23)
My hope is that people will begin to get a journal and just start writing their dreams. I cannot underscore how just doing that, it's like the doctor that says, just start walking a little bit more every day. Like just doing that puts us so much more in touch with who we are, helps us to enlarge our perspectives on our own life.

and to become more fluid in our life. And all of these things are part and parcel of creating the life that we want to live. So I do hope that people get that journal, the paper journal, write down your dreams and just see what comes up.

The Midlife Awakening (43:08)
Absolutely. So now I'm going to ask you a question I ask all my guests when they come on the show. If you could go back to your younger self and give her some advice, what would that be?

Bonnie Buckner (43:17)
I think I'm doing what my younger self needed to do. I would just say, go for it.

Yeah, just keep going.

The Midlife Awakening (43:30)
So finally Bonnie, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been wonderful speaking to you. Where can people find you if they want to work with you and where can they get you a copy of your book?

Bonnie Buckner (43:39)
Yeah. So you can find the book, the secret mind, unlock the power of dreams to transform your life on Amazon. you can also click through a link from my website, bonniebuckner.com and that's B O N N I E B U C K N E R.com or on Instagram also bonniebuckner.com, but you spell it out D O T C O And, ⁓ I do.

all the classes that I teach are through the Institute for Dreaming and Imagery.

The Midlife Awakening (44:12)
And I'll put all the links in the show notes if anybody would like to work with Bonnie or get a book. Bonnie, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been wonderful talking to you about dreams and creativity and it's so much more than what we actually think.

Bonnie Buckner (44:24)
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for reading the book. Your questions have been amazing. Thank you.

The Midlife Awakening (44:28)
Now, wasn't that just such a beautiful conversation? I came away from this conversation with Bonnie feeling like I had been handed a key, one that's been sitting in my pocket all along every single night without fully knowing how to use it. What I love most about DreamWork is that it asks nothing of us except a little stillness and a little willingness to listen. No special equipment, no expensive retreat, just you, a pretty journal.

courage to take your inner world seriously. And if you're in midlife right now and you're questioning your career, your relationships or your sense of self, sitting and wondering who am I becoming and what do I actually want? Dreams are one of the most powerful and honest mirrors you'll ever look into. They don't lie. They can't be talked out of what they already know. So here's your invitation this week. Get yourself a pretty journal, a beautiful one, one that feels like it belongs to just

this process. Put it beside your bed tonight and when you wake up tomorrow just linger a little bit. Don't reach for your phone, don't jump up, just float there for 10-15 minutes and let whatever came to you in the night begin to surface. Write it down, even the absurd part, especially the absurd parts and don't forget to also look at your night time routine. Stop looking at technology like half an hour before you go to bed.

Clean up that night time routine as well. Now, if you're interested in dream work and what we've talked about today, you can find Bonnie as she's mentioned and her book, The Secret Mind over at bonniebuckner.com. You know where all the links are, they're in the show notes. Head on down there if you're interested.

Now if this episode resonated with you, I'd be so grateful if you cheered with a friend who's in the middle of her own awakening. And if you haven't already, please do subscribe, like, share the show, review the show. It genuinely helps this show find the woman who needs it most. Now I'll be back soon with another conversation to support you on your journey. Until then, take good care of yourself, take care of your heart, and pay attention to your dreams. They know more than you think. Bye for now.