S2E1 - Dreams, Neuroscience, And Self-Awareness

What if your dreams aren’t random at all but a built-in system for emotional reset, memory sorting, and future rehearsal? We kick off season two by moving dreams from “weird night stories” to a reliable toolkit for self-awareness, drawing on neuroscience and Jungian-informed coaching to make sense of vivid scenes, recurring figures, and those “epic” marathons that leave you buzzing.

We unpack why so many people default to external meanings, and how that habit misses the point. Instead, we show how to listen inward: pick one charged character, ask what voice of you it holds, and trace it to real tensions in your day. Along the way, we share a raw personal account of a childhood nightmare that resurfaced in college, revealing how “template dreams” return when the same core emotions rise again. That story opens the door to five dream functions you can work with right away: rehash your day’s emotional weight, rehearse future challenges, recalibrate your emotional capacity, resolve problems when defenses drop, and reveal the dynamics of your personality.

You’ll hear simple recall methods that actually help, and how paying attention can flood you with rich dream material. We address overwhelm too, showing how to trim a sprawling dream into a focused, useful thread. From flying and falling motifs to the shift in themes across life stages, we connect symbols to development without forcing one-size-fits-all meanings. The takeaway is practical and hopeful: even if you don’t remember every detail, your night mind is on your side. When you engage with it, you get more bandwidth, clearer patterns, and better choices the next day.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves big questions, and leave a quick review so more curious minds can find us. What recurring dream keeps tapping your shoulder—and what might it be training you for?

You can connect with the cohosts through their respective websites:

AFCCounselors.com (Dr. Shalley) / https://www.inyourdreams.coach/contact (Dr. Kelley)

Transcript

Section A

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Season two, episode one.

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Hey Jim, it's good to see you, man.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Good to see you. Better to see you.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Welcome to Therapy Dreams. What's the name of this show?

SPEAKER_01 0:18

DC D. I don't know. Therapy Coaching and Dreams. What's the C? Coaching. Coaching and Dreams, that's true.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Welcome to the second season of Therapy Coaching in Dreams. I'm your co-host, Steve Kelly. I'm here with Jim Shaley. And we're digging a little deeper into some of the things that we do both for a living but also for enjoyment as we try and enhance self-awareness and live our life in hopefully more fulfilling ways and bring that to others. And that's part of what this podcast is all about. This season is going to focus a little bit more on the dream portion of the journey and gives me an opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the things that I use in my practice. But Jim, in our conversations over the course of our friendship, we have had so many times where we've shared dreams with each other and tried to pick them apart and offer suggestions of what they might mean in our life's journey.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

No, I love the fact that you've uh actually embraced that whole other side of our discussions because you're much more well-versed than I am when it comes to dreams.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

So your insight, though, once we get to that portion of the dream where it gives us insight as to who we are, your insight into personality and relationships and the ways in which we take what's inside and project it outward onto others and to other circumstances is so helpful in taking the work of dreams and applying it to our life. So I'm glad we're going to have this discussion over the course of the next several weeks. I have clients that come to me with very different needs and interests when they come. Some come because their dreams are troubling to them. They are specifically coming because they know that that's an area of interest. And got stuck in trying to understand what it might mean. So they've talked to a spouse, they've talked to a friend, and none of what that discussion leads to is fulfilling or satisfying for how they understand the dream.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

And so Do you often ask that do you often ask them first what they feel about the dream or not? Aaron Powell Almost always.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Uh because I want to honor the work that somebody does to apply it to their own life. And if something that they've done has been useful, I I can build on that, but I don't want to deny it. If it brought about greater self-awareness, if it gave them direction, great. You've been doing work on it. If they want to go deeper with it, then I try and provide them with some tools that can help them to do that.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Aaron Powell Do they have a bias as far as if they dream about a certain person, they say want to believe it's about that person? Or I mean how do they navigate that?

SPEAKER_02 3:36

Aaron Ross Powell I would say generally speaking, in our culture, that's always the default. Our culture externalizes dream work in overt ways. And I think that ranges from a natural tendency that if I see my high school friend in a dream, I think somehow I'm supposed to contact my high school friend and make sure everything's okay. To the sometimes the over-spiritualizing bias of the religious culture that somehow thinks that every dream is prophetic about something that's about to happen and I have to step in and do something.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

The guy who thinks it's about contacting somebody from high school, you might follow through with that. The guy from high school goes, What are you calling me for? I haven't talked to you in 40 years. What are you doing? What are you stirring up inside of me anyway?

SPEAKER_02 4:33

Well, I I have had individuals come to me and say that they had this dream and they called up somebody that they hadn't talked to in a long, long time and asked, Are you okay? Are you still alive? Because they had a dream that they passed away and they assumed that this was their admonition to somehow help them avert a disaster. And so they might come and say, So what was that all about? And so it's fun to then try and unpack for them other ways by which to look at a dream.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Got it.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Um I will also have people who come that are intrigued by dream work, but don't remember many of their dreams, and they simply want to talk about their anxiety, their depression, their relationship conflict, their family issues, pretty normal life things that are taking place and are intrigued at the notion of dream work principles to be used regardless of whether they're remembering their dreams every night. And that happens quite often. So a person has plateaued in their ability to dig deeper in a particular area of their life and they feel stuck and will reach out to me and will, if they have a dream, we'll use that as a starting point. But if they don't, I just talk about dream work theory, would say that this particular issue maybe, and then describe what it might indicate in their journey, and how a lot of the principles that you obtain or or practice in dream work can be used even if you don't remember a dream. So we spent we spent a season, first season of this podcast talking about personality theory and specifically a Jungian approach. And Jung was huge on dreams. I mean, that was a really important part of his life work. And so it's this great marriage.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

He may have been dreaming his whole life. Who knows? I think that's true. If you uh see his big red book, it's uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Yep. I I have a copy of that and have a tough time getting through it. He never quite comes out of the dream.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Boy, he doesn't. He wrote. Man, did he write?

SPEAKER_02 6:57

Yeah, he did. He did. So anyway, uh people come for a variety of reasons, and I'll have some clients that every time we meet, they'll have one or two dreams that they want to talk about. And I have other clients that may go a couple months before a dream comes to their attention to add to the discussion, to add to the coaching.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Do they notice that when they pay attention to their dreams, they tend to dream more or they remember them more, or is there any connection between the work and actually dreaming more about it, or at least remembering more? Does it ever have that advantage?

SPEAKER_02 7:35

Absolutely. I think it's a surprise to most people who don't pay attention to their dreams that everyone dreams every night.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Aaron Powell No, I think it's fascinating when people say, Yeah, I don't I don't dream. I go, well, I don't think that's true, but you know.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Yeah, that is, I think, the conclusion for many people. They don't say I don't remember my dreams. They just say I don't dream.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

And the correction of that is a surprise to some because on average, everyone dreams somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour and a half every night. And it's interesting for somebody who chooses to work on dreams and actually practice remembering, because there are some things you can do to enhance remembering your dreams, that there comes a point in time where you have too much dream material and you have to pick and choose what it is you're going to work on, because it can be overwhelming. Like I can go times when I might record as many as six dreams in a night, and I usually dictate them so that I and then there's a translator that puts it into written form. I use Apple products, and so I their notes is a great way to dictate, and then I have it out in written form. Um but I don't I don't have time that later that day to do it.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

I was gonna say I was gonna say, yeah, that's all you get done.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

So you So then you would you'd quit sleeping so you wouldn't dream anymore, so you could actually get something done.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

Yeah. Yeah. So even sometimes I'll have somebody that will come and they'll have what I call an epic dream, this dream that just goes on and on and has multiple scenes and so many characters. And it can be overwhelming to say, so where do we even begin with this? And in in moments like that, my suggestion is, well, let's just start with a character. Pick a character that seems significant to you, that's in the dream. Doesn't have to be somebody you know. It could be a a character that has no recognizable facial characteristics just tell me what was going on with that character, and we'll spend time looking at whether the character was male, female, or androgynous. Is this a masculine voice of yours? Is this a feminine voice of yours? If it is, what part of you is going through this portion of the plot line in the dream? And what's going on in your life that might have some connections to what it is that this character is either doing or saying or acting out? So we try and whittle it down to something that's manageable for the time that we have. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 10:22

Yep. So I'd I'd love to. Do you uh pay a lot of attention to dreams that seem to be more pronounced, or they they you remember more vividly than other ones or not?

SPEAKER_02 10:36

I go with whatever the energy is for the person who's talking about them. Aaron Powell Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Because sometimes sometimes if you're if you dream and then you wake up, you're more likely to remember that dream. Is that fair or not? Aaron Ross Powell Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

Because most periods of dreaming during sleep are right before you wake up. So that's why that is often the case. The exception to that is that at night when you're falling asleep, sometimes you go through an REM rapid eye movement dream phase before you go into deep sleep. So sometimes right after you fall asleep, you might have a dream that awakens you, a frightening dream, a nightmare of sort. But as the evening progresses, as the night progresses, usually the dream period is part of the sleep cycle right before you wake up.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

So can I ask you a personal question? Of course. So what about dreams intrigue you so that you have made such an emphasis in your own life about them? Is there a reason for that, or is it just it just was fascinating, interesting for you, or what what motivated that that direction?

SPEAKER_02 11:47

It probably goes back to childhood that then came back in college. I was in college, I think it was my sophomore year, and I had a dream that I hadn't had in years, probably over a maybe over a decade. And it was a childhood dream that happened over and over again. And when the dream occurred, it was so unsettling, kind of drew up some memories from the past, that I felt like I needed to go see somebody about it. I'll tell you what the dream was. As a child, I would have this dream where I had like a godlike view over what was taking place. Always took place in the house that I lived in at that moment when I had the dreams. And I could see a car pull up in front of the house and park on the curb in front of the house. And a man would get out and I would run and tell my mom, Mom, he's here, he's here. And my mom would always respond, okay, go and hide. And the only thing that would be different in the dream would be where I would hide in the house. Sometimes it'd be in a closet, sometimes it was under the bed, sometimes I'd be under the covers and try and lay as flat as I could to look like a sheet or a blanket or something. And somehow after that would happen.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Has that been your motivation to stay thin? That's exactly right. Anyway.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

You're so good at this, Jim. You get right to the heart of something. I'd love there to be a little bit of mystery for the listener, so we don't get right to the conclusion.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

I'm so sorry. I jumped right there.

SPEAKER_02 13:26

I'm so sorry. It's hard not to when you know as much as you do.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

That's absolutely true. Good lord, my brain's full of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

I would watch as the man would come to the front door, he'd walk right in, and it wouldn't matter where I had hidden myself, he would walk straight to where I was, and he had in his hand an electric cow prod, and he would shock me, and I would wake up out of bed in a panic. That was my childhood dream. Well, I don't remember the incident, but I remember being told of the incident that on, I think it was a Saturday, my dad had gone to the office for some reason. My mom was alone with my older sister and myself, just the two of us, and my mom. She received a phone call, but nobody said anything. But somehow she knew that it was this construction worker from a project that was in the property next door that had acted in some way toward her in a creepy fashion. She immediately called my dad. My dad says, make sure the doors are locked, I'll be home as fast as I can. And my mom saw this guy pull up in a car in front of the house. And she gathered my sister and I. I was preschool. I was a kind of a toddler. And we hid under a table in the guest bedroom. And I had this vague memory of my mom having us huddled and saying, uh, just be quiet, just be quiet, kids. And him trying the front door and not getting in and walking around the house and looking in the windows, and I could see his shadow at the window of the guest bedroom. Eventually he leaves, my dad shows up. I think they file a police report, but they never talk to us about it again. That was as a toddler. When I'm a grade school kid, I'm having this dream again and again, and then eventually it disappears. It's a long way to get to the fact that in college the dream comes back. And it was very unsettling. And I thought, I've got to probably see a counselor. I'd never seen a counselor before. And I go to the school counselor, and I walk in, introduce myself, intrigued by his office, all the books, stacks of paper on his desk. I sit down, and he asks me what brings me in. And I describe to him much of what I just said to you. His response was, okay, let's meet together for several times, and we'll work on trying to help you not remember your dreams. And I looked at him and I thought, huh, I don't know much about therapy, but but that doesn't seem like the right solution here. So I, you know, I'm kind of a peacemaker. I said, huh, okay. Let me I'll call back about my schedule. And I left in my head thinking, I'm never coming back to this guy again. Geez, that's funny. So apparently you don't remember this, but some time passed, not much time, but I actually told you about didn't give you all the details, but said that I went to a therapist and about a dream and I'm never going back. And you put me in contact with your brother.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Oh, is that right?

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Yeah. And that was the start. I had never met him, and that was the start of a conversation about dreams with your brother, who had been on a significant journey by that time with his own dreams. And the literature that he sent me and the authors he encouraged me to read spanned the next, oh, I don't know, 40 years of digging into it.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

If I knew that, I forgot that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

So that's I think have you told me that dream before? I don't know if I have. I I'm not sure I have. It's it sounds familiar, but I don't know specifically. But that's interesting. So cool. So that kind of put me on the journey. So do you get really you're gonna leave the audience kind of hanging? What what what does this did you figure out what the dream meant? You were traumatized by your mother, by your mother when you were a toddler? Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:14

Well, I I you already gave away the punchline. It's been about my weight loss all of these years. I gained a few pounds in college and it came back to me. So yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. So yeah, I'll jump to something that we might come back to later on in this season. And it's this conviction that I have that we all have certain template dreams, dreams that if we pay attention to them, will appear again and again, maybe slightly different form, but they are enigmatic. They are they are the way by which we address a specific emotion in our life. So dreams are in part emotional regulation. And we'll get into that a little bit more later. But the way by which they regulate our emotions is that we play out some of those emotions at night so that we can store in long-term memory factual pieces that are not as emotionally laden, and we can use them as tools for addressing things in the future. Because part of what we've learned from neuroscience is that dreams in part rehash what has been. Excuse me. But one of the reasons we rehash what has been is that we are rehearsing for future issues that we need to survive. Far more essential centuries ago when we would face far more threats during our day, but we still face very emotional threats during our day. And those things that we have experienced in the past get replayed rarely in identical fashion, but the emotional weight is what's significant. So the fear that I experienced as a child when I was getting frightened again of something that I didn't understand, of something that was coming into my life that was bigger than I knew what to do with, a template dream comes back and plays out a scenario again that allows me to wrestle with that emotion at night to try and dissipate the emotional weight so that I have emotional capacity the next day. So what we face every day, we don't have time to address all of the emotional weight of a given day. An example would be I have a near head-on accident in an intersection, and nothing happens, but I don't have time to process it because I'm late for an appointment. Well, the adrenaline pumped, the endocrine system kicked in, all kinds of things were happening inside that had an emotional weight to it, but my day's been so busy. At night, if I don't have enough dream opportunity to process the emotional weight, the next day I'm gonna be emotionally exhausted. I'm gonna be inattentive. I I might say to somebody, I'm sorry, you can't bring that to me now. I don't have the bandwidth for it. And it's actually true. I don't because I haven't recalibrated my emotions. So what I was facing, my estimation, is some things that were happening during my sophomore year in college that felt a little overwhelming and I didn't understand them. And that lack of understanding, like being a little kid where a mom tells you to do this, it replays a template dream for me so that that emotion can be processed at night. So dreams do this work for us every night, whether we pay attention to them or not. But if we pay attention to them, we have the Ability to partner with the dreams and raise self-awareness and become far more emotionally mindful and attentive to our personality style and how we deal with things and move through those phases or chapters or moments in our life with greater clarity and greater freedom because we understand them better. But if we don't pay attention to them, dreams are still going to do their work. They're just fighting against our lack of self-awareness. But every night they're going to rehash things that have taken place. They're going to rehearse for something that may come up. They're going to recalibrate our emotions so we have the capacity for the next day. They're going to resolve problems because our defenses go down and we can see issues from a new perspective. And if we pay attention, they will reveal to us parts of ourselves that we're not paying attention to. So that's great. That's what neuroscience is teaching us. And that's why I think it's so important to consider dreams and invite ourselves into a new way of seeing them and a new way of seeing ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

So it's fascinating in the sense that the dreams are trying to help us process perhaps events that we haven't fully processed. And then you end up trying to process the dream to make sense out of what the dream is about. So you're you're like double processing in that sense. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 23:29

Absolutely. The the first four of the function of dreams, again, are going to happen whether we pay attention to it or not. The rehashing, the rehearsing for the future. It generalizes what I've learned and it plays out scenarios that I've never considered as a way to prepare me for what might happen in my world. It triggers the endocrine system. It causes me to make choices and decisions. It takes what I've learned and tries to generalize it to other events. Again, whether I remember it or not, it's making neural connections all of the time during that dream phase of sleep. It recalibrates to give me emotional capacity for the next day. I love the resolve side of it because so many fields of science and understanding have had major breakthroughs by individuals who have had a dream that kind of broke open a new way to think about things. And all of us, probably whether we've realized it or not, have awakened with a fresh perspective on a problem.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Well, yeah, it's kind of like people say, Let me sleep on it.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

Yep. Yep. Literally, that's what dreams help us do is to resolve problems. Because at night the defense mechanisms go down. Our our executive function portion of the brain tells us what is not possible. It tells us what gravity does. It tells us what's going to happen in social dynamics based on our defenses and our experiences.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Well, like an executive does. Executive tries to dictate your life. So the executive function tries to dictate our lives. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:13

And when the executive drops off the playing field, the other employees have fun. That's why in the dream we can sometimes fly. We can play basketball much better than we can in real life. We can do all kinds of things.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

I mean, I had so many dreams where I could I would jump in an airplane, I could, I took off, I fly all around, and I could land that sucker. I used to have that all the time. Yeah.

unknown 25:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

I mean, and then some some would say the dream you have uh uh developmentally when you're falling, it's it's an a way to balance your ego. You're getting too full of yourself. And so that's one of the interpretations of that is that you fall to kind of bring bring balance to this the ego that's developing too much. Because typically you have those dreams in adolescence or as you young adulthood. So that flying dream is always cool because I would always wake up thinking, man, I can fly an airplane. Oh no, no, you can't.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

But in the dream world reality, there is something very real that's taking place inwardly that relates to that sense of the ability to fly.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

Yeah, and a sense of incredible freedom. Like I remember as I was doing it thinking, wow, this is this is amazing. And the period of time that I was having that, I was in graduate school and I was in my 20s, and so yeah, I think you are full of what life's gonna be and it what are the possibilities. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:51

It is interesting to consider how dreams shift as we develop over time and age. We become concerned about a different set of things, and so our dreams shift in accordance with that. Well, that's my hope for this first episode was just to introduce what the function of dreams have come to be known to us from the neuroscience perspective as well as the psychology side, and to tie in how this fits as we move into the next several episodes. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

I mean, it is fascinating to think that a third of your life you you sleep. Right. And so to just common sense would suggest there's gotta be something happening there that is worthwhile for you we humans to take a look at. And you're right. It'll it'll be it'll be great. That was a great description of of moving forward in this area. So I look forward to it.

SPEAKER_02 27:46

Yeah. Me too. I'm glad we're digging in, and I I appreciate you bouncing back and forth with me on this. I think that you said there's got to be something there. The scientific understanding of the development of who we are as humans, you can't find much in who we are that is senseless or wasted. If it has stayed with humanity consistently for so many generations, centuries, millennia, it it says that there's something there that it's doing. Let's try and understand it.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Well, yeah. And how many people have written books or horror movies based upon their dreams? I mean, that's pretty common. People wake up and startled and they put it put it on paper, and yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Yeah. Uh maybe we'll talk about a couple of those movies in a future episode, but for now, this is probably a good place to stop. Jim, as always, it's great to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Great to be with you too, Dee.

SPEAKER_02 28:45

Thanks. Thanks, man. That's it for this episode of Therapy, Coaching, and Dreams. If you're enjoying the podcast, we'd love for you to follow, rate, or share it with someone who might appreciate it as well. Thanks for being here, and until next time, keep growing, stay curious, and take good care of yourself. Yeah, now it's good stuff.