Dreams - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 5/10/23

was the primary tool. She's been a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams since nineteen ninety seven as well. In addition, she writes the Understanding Dreams column at Psychology Today known as the Oprah Daily. As the dream Catcher, Dolphin's goal is to introduce you, the public, to the value of understanding your dream and a view towards long term change. I mentioned one of her books, Have a Great Dream Book too, but she also has

have a Great Dream Book one Lady, welcome back. Have you been.

with your eyes closed. And you can even do that with your childhood home, by the way, and you do that a couple of times, and you are waking up that part of your brain that's the same facility you need in order to remember a dream. So it kind of gives you that feeling of eyes open, eyes closed, eyes open, eyes closed, and that's going to help you remember your dream.

sessions with a shrink, always with a dream. And so before I studied Freud, I learned Freud because I did Freud, and it made me realize, I'm just putting up a little wallpaper for all of us right now. I learned fifty years ago that actually a dream is an interior problem solving conversation that happens between your conscious and your unconscious mind, and it gets triggered by something very specific that you either thought about yesterday or that happened to

you yesterday. And so when we go to sleep at night, if you had, you know, ten thousand things happened to you today, which you probably did, your unconscious is going to prioritize the one thing that's bugging you the most, and all of your dreams tonight are going to be about that person or situation. And that's the conversation that

is the dream. And so what I did over these fifty years is I developed a very simple six points of entry method that anybody can use to understand what the heck you were saying to yourself when you had that crazy dream. So I'm just going to give you those six points of entry, because the whole rest of our discussion this evening is all around those six points of entry and the dream I'm going to give you. I'm always moving back and forth between the points of entry.

They are the feelings, the action, how is the dreamer moving in the dream, The play on words and puns because we use puns and play on words constantly in our sleep, the same way as we do in our waking life. The repetition because we repeat the plot and the symbols. And so those are the six points of entry.

And you'll notice, I mean, everybody's going to know how to do it by the end of this interview because I always go back to the points of entry and you'll get to hear all of them as I go through a dream.

that triggered this morning's dream. That's always my question, And the reason why I have that question is because I'm a first things first kind of girl. Even though I love Freud, love going deep. I've got no problem with deep, but I always want to stay surface first, because if you and I are going to dig for gold, which is funny that you had a commercial about gold just before I came on, I'm always digging for the gold. But if you want to dig for gold, you have

to know where are you going to begin digging? And that's what the surface reason you had the dream because you're aggravated with your girlfriend, you're aggria with your husband. And so once we know the dreamer and me understand what is the surface reason that triggered this dream, which I call the first level. Once we get the first level, then you know where to dig to go to deeper, a deeper look. And should I run in and just tell you quickly what a deeper look is?

And so that's going to help the dreamer name Like, what I do is the exact opposite of a psychic experience, because in a psychological experience, you're telling me the dream. I am not telling you why you had that dream. I'm going to ask you the right questions based on those six points of entry, and you're going to tell

me why you had that dream. It's not going to be me telling you because the dream belongs to the dreamer only, and you can ask questions to the dreamer and maybe that's how you're going to uncover what's going on, but you can't. It's not a psychic thing where you tell me the dream and I tell you why you had it.

Are you the person who always reaching out to make the plans, or are you the person who's always on the receiving end of the phone call. You could be quiet, you can be outspoken, calm, nervous. And so there's all these parts of ourselves and the people that bring us up. And they don't do it on purpose, there's no blame. But people who bring us up teach us that it's

better to be one way than another way. And so you get over exercised I call it in some aspects of your personality and under exercised in others, which is what Carl Jung would have called our shadows, these less familiar, under exercised parts of yourself. And a great example for this little section is those people that don't know how to say no. Maybe come from a home with siblings

and you hear. If you're in a home with siblings and you're not an only child, you probably hear your parents say things like, you know, go help your sister, go look after your brother, and so you hear these. You know, in any way, your whole waking life experience is all about sharing your parents. So it's a big focus on sharing and doing, sharing and doing, and those are the people that they don't know how to say no because they turn into many of them, including myself,

by the way, over accommodators. And the only reason that one personality trait it's that it's not good to be stuck with an overexercised part of your personality. The problem there is that life throws you every different kind of situation from divorce, cancer, death, I mean, oh my goodness, the job. There's like so many different things that happen to us in our waking life. You don't want to be stuck with your same knee jerk over exercised response

to waking situations and your dreams. This is the key every single night, and not by random. Your trust the unconscious mind gives you on a silver platter, the appropriate response to whatever waking life situation you're going through. Because my biggest message I could give everybody tonight is there is no good, no bad, no right, no wrong. My question on a deeper level is always am I responding in the most appropriate way to whatever situation I'm facing?

So it's not a good or bad, it's is this appropriate or not? Because if it's not appropriate, I want to have the other parts of me well exercised enough that I'm not stuck with my knee jerk reaction. And I'm seventy one, So if there's someone who's twenty or thirty or forty out there, you don't want to be turning seventy and you always have the same darn response to every different situation that happens to you. You want flexibility, because flexibility is called power.

trouble standing up. And one morning I said to Andy, my husband, I described to him I was walking on a campus, the lower campus of a university in Asheville, North Carolina, and I was on my knees. Because these are called my kneeling dreams, because I had a series of dreams for a couple of weeks and the stories in the dreams would change, but I was always walking

around on my knees. And so this morning I told him that I was doing fine on my knees, except it started to snow and I was trying to get to the upper campus, and I said to him, I couldn't stand up. And because Andy knows the six points of entry, when he heard me say I couldn't stand up, he said, why who you're having trouble standing up to? Because that was a play on words. That was fun right there, And so I started thinking to myself, who am I having trouble standing up to? But I couldn't

get it. And the next night I went to sleep, and this is an example of repetition. I dreamed that I was kneeling in the office of a guy whose name is Neil. So it's like your it's like your unconscious takes a plastic baseball bat and hitting you over the head with it. Scripts that's right, and that's why I'm getting the kneeling twice. And the guy's name is Neil. So using a symbols point of entry, I asked myself, who is Neil? What comes to my mind about him?

Name three things about Neil. And the first thing that came to my mind about Neil is that he's my brother's business associate and friend. And actually it was my

brother who I was having trouble standing up to. And if I use Neil as a solution, because I'm talking about he aggravated me about I wanting to approach him, not as the younger sister who might be crying and sad and emotional, because if you want to get through to my brother, by the way, and I still say the same thing today as I did thirty years ago. If you want to get through to my brother, the last thing you want to do is be emotional. You

don't want to be behaving like the young sister. And so I needed to access that shadowy, unfamiliar, business like aspect of myself. That's like Neil. I needed to become and approach my brother the same way that his unemotional, business like business associate friend of his would. So Neil is the solution to the dream. That's what a solution looks like. And that's why I said, it's never an accident. It's not random the people that appear in your dreams.

I needed to become Neil. And because I'm eclectic, and this is also Carl Jung's active imagination, but it's also behavioral modification, I borrowed a tie from Andy and like well, First, obviously I called my brother and I did not make the meeting at his house where I would be his little sister. I booked the meeting at his office because my dream took place in an office. So my dream is pointing me to all the answers to help me become less emotional