Dreams are not just a figment of our imagination; they are a language spoken by our bodies. Through dreamwork in coaching, we can unlock the messages hidden within and use them as a powerful tool for personal growth and transformation. In this episode, Ina Gjikondi interviews Bonnie Buckner, the founder of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery (IIDI), to explore the fascinating field of dreamwork. Bonnie explains how dreaming is actually a 24/7 experience. She discusses the often-overlooked connection between dreams and the body and how understanding this connection can lead to powerful insights and personal growth. Bonnie also introduces the different types of dreams beyond sweet ones and nightmares. She explains how coaches can use dreamwork to help their clients achieve their goals. Buckner also shares personal anecdotes and tips on how to approach Dreamwork in a meaningful and effective way. Don’t miss this episode if you’re interested in the power of dreams or want to learn more about integrating dreamwork into your coaching practice. Tune in!
Connect with Bonnie Buckner: Website | LinkedIn | The George Washington University
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Unlocking the Language of Dreams in Coaching with Dr. Bonnie Buckner
Bonnie, I’m very happy to have a little bit of a conversation with you. When we always talk to each other, sometimes I wish that I had recorded some of those conversations. This will be recorded for real. We have been partnering for some time now, and you bring an important part of the body of work to our coaching program, which is the dreamwork. I love to learn a little bit more about how you bring the dreamwork into the coaching space.
Thank you, Ina. It is great to sit down and talk to you as well.
How does it contribute to the space?
The dreamwork I do is specific and unique from a lot or any other way of looking at dreams that I know about. It is practical tool-dreams for mirroring back our experience and showing us where we are, how we feel about where we are in our life, showing us where we are blocked, and how to get over that block.
A lot of times, getting over that block is revealing latent potentials, things we don’t see as possible within ourselves because we are tangled in a certain emotional reaction to something we are feeling overwhelmed. The various things that make a lot of noise or their latent potentials we have set aside because we feel like they won’t be accepted and will cause waves or all the different outside perceptions that we let narrow us. From the outset, my approach to dreams is that they are meaningful and mirror to us that allow us to see reflections and aspects of ourselves that we can’t see when we are blasting through our regular day, going 90 to nothing.
Starting from that place, dreaming into the coaching program serves multiple purposes. One of the things it does is teaches us to listen and work with material that is unknown and strange to us. This is quite different from listening to a conversation with someone. We turn off our own listening when someone is telling us, “Here is what I need to work on now.” They tell us a story about that. We start noticing things that we have in common, “I have held that job position before. I have had that problem before.” It dulls our listening capacity.
One of the things that dreaming does is when we work with dream material, we have to pay attention to unexpected things and hone our listening to that. There might be a fire chief in the middle of a dream when there is also a plant that has something to say, and we have to listen to both of those things. There might be this completely unexpected giraffe that starts speaking. If we pay attention to how that is speaking to us, we can learn to hear more fully.
That is a simple listening exercise. Beyond that, one of the things that this practice I teach does is it has a specific way of working through dreams. There are different kinds of dreams. Some dreams are unresolved, which means there is a necessity in them. This is about a coaching session because coaching comes in and there is something that I have to figure out. Other dreams are resolved. It is equally important to know what is resolved in our life because that puts our attention to what is good, and it allows us the chance to focus on that and grow the good. Already learning how to describe the experience and differentiate between experiences is useful.
The other thing is we go through a very specific set of steps to work with dreams. As we do that, we move through four levels of dreams. The first is the story. In a coaching session, that is what someone tells us. Within that, there is something that is repeating. There are patterns. Someone is repeating the same phrase over and over. We see in a dream a repetition of a red sock that keeps showing up in strange places. Learning to notice patterns is an incredibly important step for learning how to describe a situation and solve it because the pattern is the stuck part frequently or it is trying to highlight something in some way.
The third step is saying, “What do these things mean going deeper?” In the coaching world, the vernacular for that is coaching the who, not the what. Instead of looking for a solution to something, what is the deeper meaning behind this? What is the meaning-making potential here? Using dreams as both something that in and of themselves bring something to the participants in the program but also as material to learn these critical steps to use as a model in a coaching session is two of the aspects of why dreaming in a coaching program.
When you talk about dreaming, can you say more? When you hear dreaming, it is the dreaming you do at night. What I know from your work is you often talk about awake dreaming or dreaming during awake life. That is how it comes to coaching. Can you say a bit more about how one dance between the two or how they are both useful?
I will give a bit of a story to illustrate it. The first thing to say is you have this tattooed on your mind because I say it frequently, but whatever we are living in the day, we are dreaming at night. Whatever we are dreaming at night, we are living in the day. Dreaming is a 24/7 experience. We only see it at night because we turn off our executive network and task-oriented thinking and visual language come to the forefront. Visual language is a mirror to our experience.
We look at dreams as having seven different kinds. One of those is a busy dream. A busy dream occurs when there has been what I call piling on. The first dream is a nightmare. It is acute and simple. When an immediate problem has occurred, and in the dream, there might be a toilet that is about to overflow that needs to be flushed, it might be I am being chased by someone or a pursuer or that a path is blocked. These are simple scenarios. The beginning of a challenge is quite simple. A nightmare is our best friend because it can tell us what we need to deal with now. If we deal with it now, it opens back into the flow.
I will give an example of that then I will go back to the busy dream. I worked with someone who had a nightmare of I’m in a car and going too fast. There are many people in the car. It is dark to see well on the road. The music is turned up loud and there is a gaping hole in front of me. We are going to fall in and crash. The dreamer’s ear hears a repetition of the word ‘too’. ‘Too’ in waking time translates to, “I feel everything is too much now. I’m overwhelmed.”
This is an unresolved dream or nightmare. Unresolved means that there is something that is off. I call it a necessity. It is a place of imbalance. If we respond to the necessity, we return to balance. In this particular person, we did the work on the dream to go back into the car and stop it. That is all that had to happen. As soon as the car was stopped, there was no more music, no people in the car, and the sun was out. It completely reversed the situation.
Their waking life scenario was being on a long extended work trip. There were many meetings and things going on. They had been eating too much because they were many client dinners. It was all too. I can work as a coach either way with that. Either someone brings me the dream or I know what their waking life is. I can address it through the dream by doing a little exercise that I call a dreaming awake exercise, or I can hear the dream of the person as they are telling me, “It is too.” In this case, the dream came first. We did the awake dreaming exercise. It got resolved.
The person made that tangible and waking life by canceling the rest of the trip and going back home to regroup. I had that person not do that. The gaping hole is where overwhelm would come. I don’t know what that would be. Would that have been a health breakdown? Maybe. Would that have been things falling through the cracks that work not being able to keep up? In this case, it was all dealt with, but we don’t always deal with these things. That becomes a repetitive nightmare. If that is not dealt with, it becomes a busy dream. A busy dream is the piling up where we forget the original problem and we are stuck in the emotional entanglement around the original problem.
Here is where it is brilliant in coaching. I had a session with a guy. I took it to his office. I walked in and he said, “You need to help me get a new job. I’m about to be fired.” I said, “Talk to me more about that.” He talked to me for 40 minutes about all of these things that were bad. He was getting too old to find a new job. He had been working on LinkedIn. He still hadn’t told me why he thought he was going to be fired.
The only thing that had happened was that after fifteen years of having a manager he loved and worked well with, that manager retired, and a new manager came in who shuffled all the teams and asked each person to learn new skills. They moved them into different areas, and he struggled with that. Rather than learning how to simply adapt to the new situation, this piling on of, “I’m too old. They are going to fire me. They won’t accept me. My LinkedIn is terrible. My CV is terrible. I don’t have a good retirement package. I didn’t have good insurance,” until it was piled on. That is a busy dream-waking experience. That is the one that started with the dream. If he had shown me what he dreamed at night, it was going to be a busy dream.
Why that is critical for me in coaching is I hear coaches frequently coach to what the client thinks is their problem. Who would have coached in that situation to help that person find a new job? Hearing it and knowing this was a busy dream they were piling on, I kept asking questions to get underneath the pile and find what is the problem here. It was simple to resolve. He kept his job and is flourishing. These are a couple of examples there.
This brings about what I have always heard you say is that dreaming is a present-tense experience. It is happening at the moment. It is how we experience it. In our program, the dreamwork is done as a way to develop the coach’s capacity. They can come in tune with their own experience and experience. It is a special skillset that you bring as you work with your own clients to have them bring a dream at night and they can work with it. People in our program are using that to develop their own capacity. They can see the dream in a wake life. They use that container and thinking as a way of making sense of when that client comes in, and you hear the story but hear a story in a way that you can ask the questions that need to be asked.
A lot of coaches start every year with a new cohort. The question when they have to start coaching each other and other clients is suddenly, “How do I know which questions to ask?” Working with dreams, knowing what experience we are talking about here, are we talking about a nightmare or a busy dream? There is also the clear dream which asks us to find the good that latent potential and bring it forward.
Understanding these different experiences and hearing them as waking-time experiences with the client helps you to focus the questioning in a session for the best service for the client. There is another little aspect of that, which goes back to hearing the necessity. A client will come in thinking they know their own necessity, but right questioning, I don’t like to use that word so much, but by asking the right questions, it is often revealed that necessity and path they initially wanted to take was to quell fear about stretching themselves.
The true necessity is going to require a stretch. It is going to require stepping into an unknown space. That is the whole thing of what latent potential is. I haven’t done it yet. I haven’t brought it forward yet. If I’m going to exercise a new aspect of myself, it is not going to be comfortable at the beginning. Not getting tricked by the client’s own tricking is another way that dreaming helps.
I want to go back to dreaming. You spoke about how it can show up in a coaching context. I also want to go back a step to talk about dreaming as a capacity for developing the self and the inner knowing and experiencing that capacity for experiencing. I know you have a set of ways in which you do it, but can you speak more to dreaming as a capacity and what it does in coaching and for humans?
It starts with getting people to practice writing their dreams every night. That sounds like the simplest thing. We talked about it when I got to interview you about your plant practice. That gives people bunched up by writing dreams down every day. It reveals where the cramps are of stepping into the unknown, “I didn’t include this part of my dream because it didn’t make sense.”
You don’t know how I’m going to teach you how to work with dreams yet. That move that some people make automatically omits, edits, and judges certain things. Never getting those on the page is already an interesting mirroring of the self of where I’m restricting my own self from experiencing something that is within me of my own experiencing.
When we talked in this program, the whole first semester of the program was focused on the coach themselves, inner work, this encounter with my deep inner self, and the surprises that it brings up. If learning through practicing writing my dreams down, am I able to play with the unexpected? Am I able to play with aspects of myself I didn’t know I had? Am I able to look at them with curiosity and ask questions? Sensations that come up, “I had this dream where I think I heard colors. What does that mean?”
I have people who ask me frequently, “Am I normal?” That question speaks to how small and defined they have put their experience into these little boxes rather than allowing it to be big, expanded, and unexpected. From there, when we start working with dreams, people begin to understand that in this reflective space, there is a time of laying in bed, getting up and running, and being busy. If we can extend that time of writing dreams and reflecting in that dreaming space, we are bringing a conscious cognition to that space of reflecting without engaging that executive network, without picking up the phone, and going back into tasks and goals.
Writing the dream but reflecting on it, there is so much that happens in that space. People want to know ahead of time, “What am I going to learn? What is going to happen? I don’t know, but I know it is going to be something, and it is going to be important because we never allow in busy lives that, automatically, time is going to be the space. For me, it is the space of big ideas where new thoughts, “I want to write about this. I want to talk about this. Here is an idea. Here is how to solve that problem with our team.” They come up in that time. The dreaming begins to talk and we learn a new way of dialoguing with ourselves.
Your institute is called International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery. There is this second piece, which is the second meaning imagery, and they are both connected. How does imagery play in dreaming? How does that come forth in coaching?
Dreams are composed of images and images speak to us. It is a verbal language. We get accustomed and even more detrimentally to thinking that verbal expression is the only true expression. That is what language is. Sound, touch, smell, and images are language. If you think about it for two seconds, it is clear. When someone’s fists are clenched, they don’t have to say, “I am mad.” I see an image of a fist clenched. I can understand that image. If someone is opening their arms in a circular way, I don’t have to hear them say, “Welcome.” I know it visually. I’m also going to feel it energetically.
Dreams are composed of images, and images speak to us. It is a verbal language.
From that example to a complex painting, I can stand in front of a painting. There is something I’m going to get from that. I get it in a different place than I do. Someone telling me, “Help me get a new job. I’m about to be fired.” As I had that experience with that client, I was watching his body language. I saw that he had never looked me in the eye. He was looking at his shoes. There was concave, bending forward with his chest. There wasn’t a sense of looking up or clarity. It was all defeated.
We can learn how images speak to us, but there is another aspect you are asking me about, which is the imagery exercises we do. We do a series of exercises of little short prompts that we close our eyes. I give a short prompt and you look inside and see what you see. This is a way of dreaming while awake. It is exactly the same process as dreaming. It allows you to have that spontaneous imagination for an image to come up and explore a certain topic or how I feel about a certain thing in that visual way.
It is that embodied way of experience that is exploring things through other ways.
People think that dreaming comes from your head. It doesn’t. It is that we have a neurologically brain-focused society right now. It is the new darling of science but dreaming comes from the body. What I teach is a practice of dreaming that derives from the 13th century when people lived under the stars with their toes in the sand. They were deeply embodied. They weren’t in front of computers in small apartments and cars. They were in nature and with nature, and in their bodies and with their bodies. They hadn’t separated mind from body. It was one whole.
Dreaming moves our bodies. People wake up and say, “I can’t believe this nightmare. My heart is pounding hard.” They say, “I felt such love in this dream like I have never felt before.” We can feel those feelings. The more we do dream work, the more embodied we become, and the more we are able to be in an embodied presence in our daily time when we are present in our waking dreaming.
What does that do for us? I always hold that question. What does it mean to be embodied? What does that do for people? I can be in that space and I will still get things done.
We get things done, but are we getting things done that we want to do? A big part of my work is helping people learn how to make decisions for themselves. People would not have a coaching session if they knew how to solve their own problems. How do we make a decision? People come to me all the time, “Do I take this job or this job?”
That question and not knowing how to answer that question is because of being in the head of trying to see pros and cons on paper, trying to evaluate something on paper, and trying to navigate perceptions of societal expectations of future problems that might come down the line. They were like, “If I have this, I will have more money, and I won’t have to do this.”
What I know is right for me is going to be a bodily sensation. My body will light up, or it will go dark. It will go towards. It will go away. When we learn to be embodied, we learn how to take decisions for ourselves that are right for us at that moment. We also learn how to understand social situations better. We naturally, slightly lean back on certain people or things that are being said. We lean into something. We put a shoulder toward someone that is feeling a little too much. We go full facing someone that we want more of and we want to drink in what they are saying.
When we learn to be embodied, we learn how to take decisions for ourselves that are right for us at that moment.
Being aware of these things, you are going to have a better time at cocktail parties for one thing because you can move through it. In a much bigger way, it helps people to be present in what is happening and avert conflict before it ever happens. People often have a terrible train wreck of a meeting. They come later to a coaching session. What happened? In looking at it through imagery exercises, I knew what was happening, but I was separated from myself. I couldn’t feel, sense, and respond to it in the present.
You have been doing this work for a while now. What brought you to the dream work? How did you come to it?
It is a dream that started when I was three years old. When I was three, I had a nightmare. I came out and sat on our front porch steps. I thought about this deeply because I had been having nightmares. In my three-year-old mind, I thought, “I can’t do this anymore. It is terrifying for me.” I went through all these different ideas of, “What can I do not to sleep?” I thought, “No because eventually, I will have to sleep.”
I don’t know the Guinness Book of World Records, but I know that people eventually sleep. I kept going through these different thoughts. I had a clear understanding of, “I have to learn how to master my dreams because I can’t escape them.” That is what I’m here to do. I’m going to help others to do the same thing. That was at three.
At three, you remember it, and you become aware or conscious of the idea that you had to master your dreams.
I know the dream. I am not going to say it, but I remember it from start to finish.
How were you going to master it? What did you mean by that?
I didn’t know. I knew that I needed to change it somehow. I went deeply into my questioning. I even thought, “I don’t know that I can be alive on this planet. If I die, I don’t know what dying is.” It might be one long dream. In my circular thinking, I realize I have only one recourse. That is to fix the dream. I cannot escape it.
How did that thought come? How did you come to that?
That is the big mystery of life. It came to me. I grew up in a small town in Texas. As I started to grow and get older, I frequently spoke about dreaming to my father and my grandmother. They shared with me a lot of stories of dreams that shaped decisions and moved certain decisions in our family. I discovered this whole background of dreaming there. One dream, in particular, my father told me was about when he was a little boy, he was helping his dad on the farm. He had asked to borrow his dad’s knife. He wanted to whittle a piece of wood into something. His dad said, “Okay, but don’t lose it. I only have my good knife with me now.”
At dinner, he asked for his knife back, and my dad had indeed lost it. My dad freaked out. He ran to the barn at night and couldn’t find it. His mom came out and said, “Son, you need to go to bed. If you didn’t find it, it is okay.” As she tucked him in bed, she said, “If you ask your dreams, you will see it.” He goes to sleep. In his dream, the fence posts were taller than him and he sees going along and touching 1, 2, 3.
He counts 27 on the top of the fence post and, on his tiptoes, he reaches up and there is the knife. He wakes up and he runs out 1, 2, 3. He counts up to 27. He reached up and there was the knife. He taught me, at that moment, maybe eight at that time. Waking and dreaming are the same thing. There is something I know in waking time through dreaming that I don’t know in another part of myself.
There is something we know in waking time through dreaming that we don’t know in another part of ourselves.
How is it that in that dream, he is able to see exactly? How does that happen?
We see many things during our day. By see, I mean understand and experience. You can read lots of research papers about experiments to expand the human ability to smell. We have the capacity to smell and distinguish more different smells than dogs can. It is that dogs smell so acutely. We put much reliance on visuals that we forget that we are learning our environment, mapping our environment, and gaining information through many other things, including things we don’t think about as a sense but I do, which is proprio perception, where my body is in space. My body knew I was taking myself as the dreamer. I had walked 27 posts. My body knows this. It understands this.
I asked that because we bring in the body. There is a lot of research than it used to be on embodiment and coaching. This is a great example that you shared of how the body will remember and know, but at nighttime, the body is resting. It is not hit by whatever the visual is not dominating because your eyes are closed. Now your visual is turned in and you can start seeing and sensing these images in a different way. That is how you remember. That was a good example. You often talk about your chickens at the house you are living in. I wanted to ask you this question. Do you think the chickens dream the way we do?
They do dream. Everything dreams. I’m moving into dream research. On various dream research neuroscientific basis, birds dream. Migrating birds have different structures in their brains than we do because they have to fly while one part is asleep and one part is awake. You asked, “Do they dream like we do?” I don’t know what my chickens dream, but I do know that they dream.
I also know that not as much but some with my chickens, but more when I had my dogs, I communicate with animals and plants. I clued in quite well and still do with dogs in particular. I find that any animal and plant I have ever communicated with, I communicate with. I simply move into the dream field. It becomes a communication of images. When I had my dogs, we were close in that way. There were times when they would enter a night dream of mine and be dreaming with me. I would enter a dream of theirs. I knew the difference because this is part of the practice of distinguishing experience. I know what my dream feels like and how different that is if I step into someone else’s dream.
We were talking about non-humans for a moment, but even within humans is the same way. I imagined being in a field with the client and in this awake dreaming. Because you are tuned and in touch with your own sense of experience, you can understand what is yours and what is the client’s coming, which is an important skill for coaches to do that discerning. We get all the questions, “Is this me, or am I projecting?”
This is a whole other reason why dreaming is important in this practice in the coaching program because to go back to that, ICF talks about being intuitive in your coaching, but that is all they say. They don’t say what that means. What is intuition? What are the ethical ramifications of that? Do I speak to my intuition? Do I let it be diagnostic to me? How do I distinguish between what I’m feeling versus a projection? Learning how to describe the embodied experience of dreaming, a means of knowing, “This is coming up from me. This is something that is in the dream field,” versus, “I’m having a thought about this.” Making that distinction was a good way of thank you, chickens dreaming.
One last question. You asked me in our last episode together about books I’m reading. I wanted to ask you. I thought, “I’m going to ask Bonnie about movies,” because you are not huge on tech. You understand media and image well because you have even been teaching classes in that domain. I am curious, what is the latest movie or documentary that you watched?
I have seen a couple of things because, in January 2023, I had COVID. At that time, I did watch a few things. I watched two things that stood out to me. One was a movie called Shoplifters. I don’t know if it is Taiwanese or Japanese. I’m not sure about the country of origin, but it is a beautiful film about certain complexities in the relationship. It wasn’t so much a visually-based film that was interesting to me, but rather about love within imperfection. I find that redemptive and beautiful in many different ways.
The other I saw was Tracks. It is a true story about a woman who wanted to walk across Australia with camels by herself. It is beautiful in a different way. It is sweeping this environment and this visual experience of being in Australia. I spent some time in Australia in the desert with some aboriginal elder women doing some dreaming time.
That both brings back that sense of memory for me and this interesting experience of what can happen when we wander. Wandering is such an important practice of walking with a light goal in mind. I go out on wanders. My goal in mind is, before sundown, I want to come back home. I follow whatever trail my intuition is taking me on and where I want to go and that self-discovery happens along the way.
Is there anything else you would like to share with the readers? I’m sure we can keep going here, but anything else you want to say?
I would end with a little invitation. It is easy to start a dream practice. You don’t have to be in a coaching program to do it. Simply go out and find a journal that you love and exciting. You are excited about touching it and what might be in it. All of these things help you to remember your dreams. Begin to write your dreams and reflect on them. Something interesting will happen.
That is a great invitation. I would encourage everybody to step into it. It is going to help you to build that baseline for the experience. Whether you are a coach with your client, a human in the world, a parent, or a coworker, you are going to become a lot more aware of your own baseline of experience. It opens up a lot more for us that way. Thank you, Bonnie. This has been fun.
Thanks, Ina.
Important Links
- Bonnie Buckner
- International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery
- https://CEPL.CPS.GWU.edu/Bonnie-Buckner
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/BonnieBuckner/
About Bonnie Buckner
Bonnie Buckner is the co-host of the podcast One Humanity Lab: Into an Ecology of Wholeness. Bonnie is the founder and head of the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery (IIDI), which teaches and trains professionals, and develops practices, for applying dreaming and imagery work in various fields. Bonnie has been teaching dreaming and imagery to individuals and organizations around the world for almost twenty years. She has brought this transformative work to such diverse fields as leadership, coaching, government, the performing and creative arts, and academia. The Institute’s project Dream Your World Kids (DYW Kids) teaches these skills to young people from elementary through university age.
Bonnie is a Senior Fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Excellence in Public Leadership and Co-Faculty Director in their e-Co Leadership Coaching Certification program. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology, with an emphasis in media, and her academic work centers on the study and use of images as cognitive tools for behavioral change, and as the means by which we build communities, society, and culture. She is a PCC ICF credentialed coach, and a certified Imagery Practitioner for the School of Images. She is the author of Dream Your Self into Being.
Bonnie is a former adjunct lecturer for Fielding Graduate University in their doctoral and master in Media Psychology and Social Change programs and has spoken internationally on various topics of the imagination, cognition, creativity, dreaming, and role of images in media and society. Her past experience includes co-founding MicroFocus Media, a political-media research company with clients including presidential and other high-level campaigns, and spearheading numerous community development programs including serving on the launch board for the Wilshire Center-KoreaTown Business Council and the grant selection committee for the Los Angeles Mayor’s Community Beautification office. In her twenties, she worked in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, including running a film/television production company and producing documentary programming.