S2E2 - Dreams, Decisions, And Emotional Weight

Your mind doesn’t clock out when you do. It goes to work overnight, sorting stress, rehearsing choices, and resetting emotions so you can meet tomorrow with more capacity. We dig into how that process actually feels—starting with a simple dream about buying a trailer and the hidden worries it carried—and then open a vivid story about a 100‑foot pole, a dropped paint bucket, and the kind of repeating dream that wakes you breathless. Rather than treat these moments as oddities, we use them as a lens on the five core functions of dreams: rehash, rehearse, resolve, recalibrate, and reveal.

Along the way, we connect dream life to day life. If you’ve ever snapped at a partner or child and wondered, “Where did that come from?” this conversation offers a compassionate answer. Dreams often surface the feelings we failed to notice. By practicing emotional mindfulness—especially when social media and politics tempt us to vilify others—we can spot projection, own our reactions, and stop the kick-the-cat chain before it starts. Dreams don’t shame; they nudge. When we listen, we move from reflex to choice.

The most practical surprise here is that better dream work starts with better sleep. We unpack why deep sleep stacks earlier in the night and REM crowds the final third, which means trimming an hour often slashes dream time and tomorrow’s emotional steadiness. From daylight saving data to simple sleep hygiene, we share clear steps: consistent bedtimes, darker rooms, cooler temps, fewer screens, and a gentle wake. One small shift—even moving bedtime from 10:30 to 9:30—can lift energy, improve mood, and unlock recall that makes morning insights possible.

Join us for a grounded, story-rich guide to how the night mind helps the day mind. If this resonated, follow the show, leave a quick review, and share it with a friend who could use better sleep.

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_00 0:11

Welcome to uh this week with Therapy Coaching in Dreams. I'm your host, D. Kelly, and I'm here with Jim Shale. And we are jumping in a little bit further into the dream side of things. And last week we gave a little bit of introduction to the function of dreams. Uh this week I thought we'd go a little bit further with not only the function, but some of the things that we can do to begin to remember our dreams if that's something that we'd like to do, and how they get used by using a few examples. Last week, we used an example from my childhood that came back during my college years. Any dream this week that you're wanting to mention, Jim?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

I love that question. You know, I had one last night, but I cannot remember it. I woke up and I thought, I need to remember this because we're going to talk about that today. And it was about, I know this is going to be it had the theme of what we just talked about before we we started recording, although we did start recording anyway, buying a trailer. I'm in the process of thinking about buying a trailer, so I dreamt about that and how the guy was not available. And so that that was interesting. I I just assumed that was an anxiety dream about trying to decide whether to buy a trailer or not. But you could you could help me with that.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

We talked uh last episode about how sometimes we rehash what our last couple days have held. And that was definitely on my mind the last couple days. So And it it then, if we're wanting to work through some of the details of it, we would wrestle a little bit with is there emotional weight to that decision making, to that issue that you haven't been paying enough attention to, or maybe you have paid attention, but it just requires a little more processing at night. And it could raise issues of financial pressures, decision making, an upcoming trip that's carrying some more emotional weight than you've thought about. And that emotional weight doesn't always have to be negative. It can be just real positive emotional weight. But if we're not paying attention to it enough, sometimes that will become residue or something that gets processed in the course of Dreams at night. So it would make sense that given that you've got some choices to make as to whether you're gonna travel quite a few hours to go see that trailer, make a decision about the purchase, trying to weave it into a weekend that could be filled with other things.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Well, the chip plus it changes a trip I'm taking soon. It changes it might change the dynamic of that. So I you you're thinking through that. So it's it's always on the kind of the back of your mind, the whole process.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

So is that kind of what you're talking about? Absolutely. And for me, one of the things that I try and communicate to clients and to do myself is uh twofold. The first is just a spirit of gratitude that your body, your mind is created in such a way that it's working behind the scenes every night on those things to recalibrate your emotions to give you enough emotional capacity for the next day. So we don't have to pay attention to our dreams for that to happen. It's happening every night. And what an amazing thing that we have pretty emotionally weighted things that take place. And at night they get processed. Some of them get transferred into long-term memory to benefit us in decision-making in the future. But then if we decide to be more consciously aware of them, we can step into that realm of what they might reveal about what's inside of us. And that's the other portion that I think is so valuable is emotional mindfulness, just raising our awareness of what we wrestle with and what consumes our day that we're not paying attention to. Because often that comes out in sometimes very sideways actions. So I might bark at my spouse, or my reaction to something that one of my kids does is out of proportion to what happened. Sometimes that is a result of a lack of emotional mindfulness of all of the other weightedness that's going on at a day.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yeah, just just trying to really increase the intentionality of your life. Yeah, I agree. That that's that's a really great, good way of looking at it. Instead of kind of saying, why am I dreaming about that? Well, just pay attention. I mean, how many of us just go through life not really paying attention to how the world affects us or how we affect the world, we just react to it. So I like that in the sense that those dreams are really trying to help us become more intentional, not not to kind of get get crazy where we obsess about our lives so much so we're immobilized, but really just appreciate this thing called life. I mean, in the moment. Any given, like we've talked about in our other podcast, just being so intentional about where I need to be, how do I need to be present in this moment, all those things can be really enhanced, I think, with with your idea of dreams.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

That's great. One of the things we've talked about a few times in the previous season is to pay attention to how other people trigger us, the vilifying, vilification of other people that typically happens, and it's happening culturally in our political climate today, where we vilify the other. And one of the things that we encourage is to ask: so, what is it inside of us that mirrors what we're vilificating, vilifying in the other person? And dreams have a way of bringing that to the surface so that when we have an emotional reaction to a family member that's way out of proportion to what actually happened, the question, if we have the consciousness, the wherewithal to do this is to say, wow, where did that come from? What have I not been paying attention to in my emotional life that needs attention so that I don't take it out on my dog. I don't take it out on a family member or a friend. And that's part of what is, I think, a calling to enjoy life more, is to just move the unconscious stuff into a conscious space so that we can be fully present.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Right. Some would say that's that's the goal of life. Is to make the unconscious conscious. And there's lots of opportunities for that to happen. Right. As opposed to just simply well, they just made me mad. So yeah, they just made me mad. Okay. Well, that's that's great. Yeah. Yeah. And let's make them let's make them mad back.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Yeah. I vilify someone else, they vilify me, or they vilify another person. I remember team. Social media has brought that out really yeah. I I remember a skip from years ago where the boss takes it out on an employee, an employee takes it out on their spouse, the spouse takes it out on a child, the child takes it out on a younger sibling, and the sibling kicks the cat. And how much better the world would be if the boss just walked into the house, kicked the cat, and everybody else in between was left free of that terrible sequence. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Except if you love cats. Well, yeah. I'm just saying that might not be the best analogy, but I understand what you're saying. Or the best would be for the man to realize what's making him so angry and you know, processing that. But it's a lot easier just to kick cat, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

But the point of that is that so much can transpire and snowball because nobody is stopping that that system, that sequence. So true. Yeah. I'd like to mention a dream that I I don't think I've shared with you before, but it relates to a situation that I think you will remember. And this ties into one of the five functions of dreams. The five functions reminder from last episode is rehash things of the past, rehearse as we learn and generalize for the future. We rehearse in our dreams, we resolve problems in our dreams because the defense mechanisms drop and the executive functioning of the brain goes to sleep, and we're able to think of problems in a new way. We recalibrate our emotions, getting prepared for the next day to have emotional capacity. And we can learn from our dreams what they might reveal about our inner workings. So this rehash one for me. I'm I'm asleep, dream occurs, and I am up high on a pole, and I have this panic moment that I'm about to lose my connection, my balance.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

And I think I remember I think I remember the uh the moment in real life.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

So go ahead. I reach out in a panic to try and grab hold of this pole because I realize how high up I am. And in this panic that I'm about to fall, I grab hold and I wake up gasping for breath, and I realize I'm safe, I'm in bed. I happened that particular night to be visiting my grandmother in Kansas City, and so I was in the guest bedroom. I go back to sleep. Seriously, no more than about 10, 15 minutes past, the dream repeats itself. I wake up in this panic trying to grab on to the pole that I was trying to climb with pole climbers, and in a panic that I was gonna fall. I'm not kidding, Jim. In the course of the night, I woke up in a panic at least five, but maybe as many as seven times as this dream just kept repeating. Was this actually after the event? This was the night after the event. Okay. So for those of you are you gonna share the event?

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Would you like to share it, or would you like me to? I think it's I think it's your event. So I mean, I was the impetus of the event, but you you took the event to the next level, let's say.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Yeah. So this uh event that happened on the day before these dreams processed rehashed the emotional weight of the day. You, Jim, had asked me to come out. I was living in Michigan at the time, and help you paint a 100-foot wooden pole. Let me repeat that a 100-foot wooden pole.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

And you had borrowed that was used as an antenna for a radio station at the place I was going to school that no longer is there, but anyway.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Yep. Yeah. And you had borrowed some pole climbers. Well, were they tree climbers or pole climbers? I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Well, they're they're climbers for telephone poles. But you can also climb a tree and you know, cut trees out and stuff with them if you want. But they're usually designed for uh telephone pole uh climbers that people don't do much anymore.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

So and how much experience had either one of us had using pole climbers?

SPEAKER_01 12:06

I think I had uh I think I'd actually rented them, and I had walked around the neighborhood of where I was living going up and down trees about three or four feet off the ground. So that was the extent of my my training on these pole climbers. Yeah. So yeah, not much. And you had you probably hadn't had any training. That that's I put the word training in quotes.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

So So to make a long story short, there was a point in time in this afternoon where we were trying to paint this pole where I was up near the top, about 90 feet up, and a bucket of paint was in between my legs as I was trying to paint this pole, and I heard a little click sound, and I looked down to see that the bucket of paint had come unhatched out of my belt hooks, and I watched it as it hit the ground and splattered all over the building, the wall of the building right beside it. You were in absolute laughter rolling on the ground at what had taken place.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

All over this bush, all over the side of this brick, brick building.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Silver paint. I remember that very well. And I normally would laugh except my belt that held me in place was in the same hooks that somehow the paint bucket had come out of. And all I could think of was what happens if my belt comes out of that loop and all of a sudden the nerves just started going. By this time, I it was kind of growing that emotional anxiety. And I think maybe I had painted the top 30 feet of this antenna.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

You used definitely there was a metal antenna at the top, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Oh my goodness, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

And then you had to but yeah, you got the top third done, and I and I think we did the bottom third, so we had like a pickup stick, those old-fashioned pickup sticks. Yeah. The tips were painted, but the middle section wasn't. Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Mm-hmm. You did great. Uh I I was in a panic and I needed to come down, and neither one of us wanted to go back. And then we went, I don't know, we had dinner, we laughed, we had a good time. That night, five to seven times I was awakened by this dream in a panic. I don't think you ever told me that. Yeah. And it was the definition of rehashing an emotional event that carried more emotional weight than I had acknowledged. Certainly I hadn't acknowledged it to you, but I hadn't even acknowledged it to myself.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

No, I mean, it was crazy. I mean, I I was down watching you. It was it was insane to watch you do it. And then to find out how you unhook but to get around the thing and all that, it's like, what? And then I, of course, I spent a lot of time putting dirt on the side of the building to try to get the paint off of it. And thankfully, we got most of it off. So no, that's that's that's that's a I can understand why you had those dreams. Yeah, yeah. But I think your your point being you underestimated the impact of those moments.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Absolutely, 100%. And I think it has been a reminder to me through my entire journey of looking at dreams is that that is our typical tendency, is that we underestimate the emotional weight of events, or we don't have time to process it, or we don't know how.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Sometimes we overestimate, and so then I'm wondering if that if that helps the processing to overestimate the I don't know. That's an interesting thought I just had, in the sense that if people ruminate a lot and worry a lot, how do their dreams play out when it bec when it comes to an event that maybe wasn't as traumatic as they they felt like it was? Right. Right. Like the min like the minimizers and the maximizers. Wonder how that affects the processing of dreams. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Great point. That'd be a good research project. I I think that I would never make a comparison between what I did and those who struggle with the very difficult PTSD symptoms. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Right. Or even even I mean, that's why they they have first responders who want to process and talk to counselors or whatever, so they don't so they don't minimize it.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Yeah. Yeah. But it is a it was an example in my life of how someone who actually does suffer from long-term symptoms of PTSD, that the emotional weightedness of that trauma keeps showing up at night and it wakes them up. I remember after the third one where I was awakened, I didn't want to go back to sleep. I didn't want that dream to happen again. Even though I knew I was safe in bed, the emotional reaction was so dramatic that after trying to keep myself awake, I finally said, I got to go to sleep again. I got to get some rest tonight. And it processed, the dream never came back that I remember. So dreams did their work by allowing some of that emotional weight to get spent in the middle of the night.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Pretty powerful. So you can imagine people that have been in really traumatic situations, how yeah, they wouldn't want to go to sleep.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

I'm going to relive that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that means a strong example of rehashing and emotional recalibration, two of the really important functions of dreams. We'll talk about all five of those functions as these weeks progress, but I would love as a way to kind of give the audience something to begin to work on. I've got 10 principles of dream work that I use over and over again. And maybe if I could just to start with the first two principles. That sounds great. Yeah. Okay. The first principle isn't directly related to dreams until you understand the implications. And that's the principle of protect your sleep. Sometimes with individuals, I have to just get them to pay attention to how important sleep is.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Absolutely. That's not only in your in in dream work, but just in good psychology. Consistent regular sleep patterns are so important. But you're right.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Go ahead. No, I and I appreciate you saying that. I I think we often talk about three pillars or legs of the stool of health, and they are nutrition, exercise, and sleep. But by far, the issue of sleep has shown in studies again and again and again that poor sleep patterns lead to all kinds of things, including a shortened lifespan. Yeah, so interruptive. Absolutely true. Yeah. Yeah. I when I work with couples, I try and dispel the myth of try and resolve every problem before you go to sleep at night. My posture is would you please get a good night's sleep and then talk? That's true. It'll make my work a lot easier if you all could sleep well. There is an interesting, I don't know if you know this or not, they've done some studies in regard to here in the United States daylight savings time. I don't know if you're familiar with that or not. Um but testing both in the fall when you fall back an hour on the clock and in the spring where you spring forward. Yeah, we're about ready. We're about ready to do that. Yeah, that's what reminded me of it. And they've done tests of highway accidents and emergency room visits regarding heart issues. And the testing is when we lose an hour of sleep for daylight savings time, highway accidents, including death on highway accidents, and incidents in the emergency room, both escalate significantly. Is there right? Yeah. And in that time when we get an extra hour sleep, those same statistics drop in that following 24-hour period because of sleep. So really interesting that anybody even thought to do that study, but that it relates to how important uh sleep is.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah, all I know is that you know, the bursary night of November, it gets dark. I love how you've thought that through. It just gets dark. Yeah. And next thing I know, I'm leaving my office and it's dark.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you why sleep is so important to dream work. We know that everybody dreams somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 minutes every night, and it is domin dominantly it's during REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. It's not exclusive to REM sleep, but it it dominates REM sleep. Well, here's what we found out about sleeping that deep sleep is the dominant sleep pattern during the first one half to two-thirds of a given night's sleep. And REM or dream sleep dominates the last third of our sleeping cycle. So it doesn't matter if we're cutting short the first hour of sleep or the last hour of sleep. The body only knows that I'm only getting six hours instead of eight hours or whatever my sleep pattern.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

So my six hours, if that's what I'm getting, will be dominated by sleep, deep sleep, because there are some very physical things that need to happen during deep sleep that body knows is a high priority. But the processing of emotions that takes place during REM sleep is what gets caught cut off. So if we cut off, let's just say 20% of our sleep, it is primarily affecting REM sleep, and it's more than 20%. It's like we're cutting off half of REM sleep. Yeah. And so our emotional capacity through poor sleep patterns is greatly decreased because we're not protecting our sleep. So that's principle number one. That's great. That's interesting. It makes sense. Yeah. So when somebody is wanting to come talk to me and they say, but I have a tough time. I know I'm dreaming it. I have a tough time remember it. First step in dream work is okay, let's just talk about how you learn to protect your sleep. What are good sleep hygiene habits? What do you do at night? Is the room dark? Do you pay attention to the temperature of the room? How do you get ready for sleep? Do you wake up via an alarm? How do you go about all of these things? And that's often a wonderful way by which somebody can up their level of dream recollection is by protecting your sleep. It's the first dream principle. So anyway, I find that it has multiple benefits, as you said. I I had uh somebody who has stayed in contact working with on her dreams, but the dramatic change in her life came less through deep analysis of her dreams than it came from our first session where we talked about how important sleep is. And she said, I completely changed my habits. The first week that I changed my patterns, everyone in my family said, Why are you going to bed so early? And she said, I'm kind of running an experiment for myself because I don't think I'm getting enough sleep. And the family system had to adjust around her going to bed at 9:30 instead of 11:30. And she talked about the dramatic shift that that made in her life in terms of energy and feeling positive about her outlook.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Or just changing, just changing the family dynamic as well. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Mom's taking care of herself. What?

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Plus, she's not available. They have to shift their their priorities, I'm sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Plus, it's just it it just the other idea of being intentional about sleep. One of the most important aspects of our lives that we just kind of take for granted if I lay down, I'm going to go to sleep. We don't prepare ourselves, anything like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

It's interesting. And yet it's a third of our life. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Yeah. That's probably a good place to stop. Thanks for entertaining my ruminations. No, that's great.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

I'm learning some stuff, so that's cool. It's great. Thanks, Jim. Good to be with you. Good to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

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.