Leverage Your Dreams and Manifest What You’re Searching For

Hilary DeCesare: 00:00:00

Hey everyone, welcome to today's show. And you know how I love taking you to those places that we all question we all are like thinking like, I don't know a lot about that. Or maybe you've wanted to get more into it. But how about understanding more about your dreams? Your nightmares from a person who has been studying this for years, has written books on it, this is going to be a lively session. Linda Schiller is an m s. W. Li Si SW. She's the author of P T. S dreams. Transform your nightmares from trauma through healing dreamwork 2022 of modern dreamwork new tools for decoding your soul's wisdom, both published by Llewellyn worldwide publishing and of integrated and comprehensive treatment of trauma Western schools. She is the International Teacher, Dream worker, psychotherapist and Linda taught clinical group work as a professor emeritus from Boston University School of the School of Social Work and postgraduate trauma surgeon certificate programs at several universities she regularly presents at the International Association for the Study of dreams, their annual conference, so she is up to date on all the new information that's coming out and the venues in this field of dreams, trauma work and your energy, psychology, Kabbalah and healing and the integration that this all has around your mind, body, and spirit.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:01:59

You're listening to the Relaunch podcast and I'm your host, Hilary DeCesare, best selling author, speaker and transformational coach widely recognized in the worlds of neuro psychology and business launches, which cultivated the one and only three HQ method helping midlife women. Yep, that's me to rebuild a life of purpose, possibility and inspiring business ventures. Each week, we'll be diving into the stories that brought upon the most inspirational relaunches while sharing the methods and the secrets that they learned along the way, so that you too, can have not just an ordinary relaunch, but an extraordinary relaunch.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:02:51

So excited to have you here. Linda, this has been one that I have been when I first saw your name. I'm like, oh, there's so much that is unanswered about dreams. So welcome. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the show today.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:03:06

Thank you very much. Nice to be here.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:03:09

Hmm. So Linda, what, you know, what was the relaunch experience that brought you into the dream world?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:03:19

Well, there's two ways to answer that question. And what brought me into the dream world wasn't the relaunch experience, per se, but then later, the reloj experience that you kindly asked me to think about and send you before the show helped solidify it for me. So I had googly

Hilary DeCesare: 00:03:41

eye, let's go back to that relaunch experience that kind of set you on your path. And how that that ended up, harnessing this whole world around dreams for you.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:03:54

Okay, so I have been a psychotherapist and working with a lot of people who've had various sorts of of loss and trauma in their lives. And I also had been in my own dream circle for many years before my re launch experience and also teaching dream work to others. And then when my husband and I got married, we were in our late 30s, early 40s. And we wanted to have a family. We both joke that we each had a practice marriage first where we there were no kids involved. And then when we met

Hilary DeCesare: 00:04:29

I had one of those two buttons are kids involved?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:04:33

Pardon? There were weren't.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:04:34

There are we've got

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:04:35

okay. Yeah. Yeah, I also had a blended family growing up, so. But anyway, my husband and I wanted him kids and we were both older and we tried to get pregnant and couldn't. And my husband had a history of cancer and had had cancer treatment. So we knew sort of from the get go that that was not necessarily going to be an easy road for us. And I was over 40. So, as my, as my doctor said, I already had old eggs to start with,

Hilary DeCesare: 00:05:10

which was like, I love that when they really like

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:05:13

to call them but it's like, okay, so um, so, you know, we went through fertility treatments and did all sorts of things from the sort of the simplest of this like, well, without going into all the details from the simplest to somewhat more complex. And along the way, I also participated in a mindfulness body mind group. That was part of John Kabat Zinn's I'm blanking out what it's called. But his mindfulness meditation work, it was a 10 week course I remember was offered through one of the local hospitals. And I remember that the woman who was facilitating the class, and they were, I don't know, 1520 of us in the class, and the facilitator was this lovely person who had an adopted daughter. And I remember thinking, wow, how could she be facilitating a group from a bunch of women who are trying to get pregnant when she herself didn't get pregnant. And there was a part of me that sort of felt, Oh, I hope she's okay. I mean, she was doing this, you know, on purpose, she was getting paid. This was her profession. But I remember having that thought. And then as the class when I was 10 weeks, a few women began to get pregnant, there were all different circumstances. In the past, someone I remember, one young woman had had four or five miscarriages before the class and some of us had never been pregnant. There were a few people in the class who had previously had an abortion, and now we're trying to get pregnant on purpose. So there's a whole range of, you know, ages and reasons for being in the group. And at 1.1, or two women in the group said, you know, I'm done trying these sorts of medically invasive things, I'm going to start the adoption process. And we she brought home her daughter, this other woman in the class brought home her daughter from China, and invited us to the welcome party for her daughter. And I remember looking at my friend in the group and looking at her daughter and thinking, we could do that. We weren't quite ready to like, give up the, the ghost, so to speak, in terms of trying to get pregnant in the old fashioned way. But it created a possibility for me, in the first time to think about it in a different way. And after, I don't know, about two years, I think of, you know, infertility treatments, I finally said, you know, no more. And we can do this we can we can adopt the daughter, our daughter from China. And at the time, and probably still now, it was pretty much was daughters, because I think about 90 to 95% of all the babies who were freed for adoption. In time there were girls. And so that was the relaunch experience. Like I started off with this woman in my group, facilitating and I sort of felt a little bad for her. They Oh, I hope she's okay. And then a friend of mine who was doing the group with me, sort of was going through the same process I was on when she was just a few clicks ahead. On her, she might have been a little older, or maybe not, but she just was like ready sooner to consider another option. And then we got there. And it was absolutely meant to be. And there's a wonderful word in Yiddish called be shared. And shared means it was fated or meant to be. And it's often used when you meet your beloved who's going to be your life partner, he or she is your shared, but it can be used for anything that feels like this was just meant to be. So it was really clear that our daughter was just shared she was meant to be and that was 20. Well, we began the process, I guess about 27 or 28 years ago, we I joke, it was like a two year pregnancy, because from start to finish, it took about 18 months to go through the adoption process. But she's now 25 years old, and she's in graduate school for social work. And

Hilary DeCesare: 00:09:20

it is sorry, I mean, the How wonderful. What a wonderful story that is. Thank you. And so then you brought her home. And I'm curious now, you know, I'm wondering how did this all happen in terms of dreams?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:09:40

Well, that's the interesting story. We started the process and we connected with an organization in the greater Boston area called China adoption was love. And we went through the process and you fill out the forms and you meet with people and their home studies and everything that goes along with adopting a child and then you get with call of your referral. And the referral. That's an adoption parlons from China at the time, was this little tiny, tiny picture about as big as a postage stamp of your prospective child. And then a little bit of information about her. So they sent us this picture, this little tiny picture. And they said, She's this old and she weighs this much. And we thought, oh, something's wrong with this picture. Because if she's that old and weighs that much, that doesn't sound right, she sounded really underweight and maybe not healthy. So we said, well, you know, is she really a year old? And is this really her birthday? She only weighs 15 pounds, because that's about as much as we would expect a six month old to weigh now not a year old. And so they quickly, you know, backtracked and said, Oh, no, no, no. Did we say her birthday was February? No, no, we meant April. It was just a typo, wherever, whatever the language was. So we weren't sure. So I remember we're sitting in the office of the adoption agency, my husband and I and the woman, Lillian was her name. And I said, you know, we, we think this is right. But I said, can I go home and dream? And I want to be really sure. So I had been doing dream work already. And I wanted to practice a process called Dream incubation, which would let me know yes or no. Is this our daughter?

Hilary DeCesare: 00:11:25

I love it. You didn't say can I think on it? You're like, can I dream on it? That's very cool. Can I dream on it?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:11:32

Thank you. And I literally meant have a dream, not just like mull it over like. So what dream incubation is, is before you go to sleep at night, if you have an issue with dilemma, a problem a question that you want information about, from your highest, deepest, wiser self, from your dream use wherever you think, depending on your spiritual belief system where dreams come from, you spend a few minutes journaling about the question. Yeah, you can spend one minute just write down a question or you can sit for half an hour and do some journaling. But the key is when you're doing dream incubation as you end with a question. And the more clear and specific your question, the better chance you have of getting a dream that will directly answer the question without too many layers of symbolism and metaphor, because you know, dreams frequently will come with symbols and metaphors. So we have to unpack them, and unpeel them to figure them out. And so Lillian answered, she said, Yes, you could have till tomorrow, but you have to tell me tomorrow. Because if this is not the referral that you want to accept, then she will go back on the waitlist, I guess, and we we will find you somebody else was like, okay, the stakes were pretty high with my dream you. Yeah.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:12:47

Now, Linda, at this point, you've already been practicing the dream incubation?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:12:53

Well, I've been doing that in my life, but not for this question.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:12:56

Oh, yeah. Not for the question. But you were, you were now you knew that you could put something out there and get an answer. Yes. Okay.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:13:06

Well, I had never before had the stakes be. I have a question that's this critical. That has to be answered definitively by tomorrow. But I've got to have the dream tonight in order to get I've never done that as

Hilary DeCesare: 00:13:19

pretty specific.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:13:22

And can I may I say never since either have I ever been that specific? On this was like, you know, literally life and death. So I remember, I went home that night, and I wrote on my dream journal, you know? Is this our daughter? Right? Do we say yes or no to this adoption from this little baby picture that we were sent in them? Yeah. Real clear and specific. So I woke up a few times in the night, no dream, no dream. Finally, seven in the morning, I wake up, I've got a dream. I write it down. And you have to write your dreams down in order to remember them because you know, they're like, a femoral wisps of smoke. So I wrote it down. And I knew right away what it meant. So I'll tell you the dream in one minute, but let me tell you, the backstory and the context. So Oh, three minutes until the break.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:14:17

Keep going. I'll let you know when we're

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:14:20

at better wrap. They'll suck faster. So I'm gonna leave people waiting.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:14:25

That's what I usually do. It's always very suspenseful. And don't worry, everyone, we are going to get all of your questions, answers, including the ones out that are saying I don't dream. I got your back.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:14:36

But yeah, well, we'll get to that. So anyway, so the dreams are always contextualized in the life of the dreamer. So my dream and my image and my symbol is going to be something to do with my life. You could dream the same image or symbol, and it could be different for you because it has to do with your life. So that's the background of what it means to contextualize the symbol

Hilary DeCesare: 00:14:58

itself can anything? Yes.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:15:01

Okay. Yes, or the storyline. So here's the background. And then I'll tell you the dream. And you'll see why I knew immediately what the answer was. The background information was a couple of years before when my husband I got married, my mother in law gifted us with a, a tool shed to keep our gardening tools in. And when the guy came to put the tool shed, we live on a hill on a slope. So what was gonna go underneath where our deck was? And he said, The Oh, it doesn't quite fit. But don't worry, I can dig down, I'll put in a foundation, and it'll fit fine. And that's what he did. He dug down a little bit in the earth, put in the foundation, put in the tool shed all set. That's our gardening tools. So here's the dream. I had seven that morning. In my dream. We were given a tool shed. It was a little bit bigger than we had expected. But it fit just fine. Yeah, it was a yes. She was a little older than we would have expected for that. Wait. Yeah, she was our daughter.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:16:05

Ah, that is so great. And so question for you. You said in the morning, do you find that a lot of dreams happen in the morning? Are those just the ones you remember?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:16:17

You've got it. We all dream, five to seven times every night are during REM sleep because we have sleep cycles. And there are different stages and depths of sleeping. And we have our deepest dreams during REM rapid eye movement sleep. But we tend only to remember those that happen just before we wake up. Whether that's waking in the night. If you get up to go to the bathroom or you just wake up in the night for some reason. Or in the morning, when we wake up. Those are the ones we're going to mostly remember.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:16:50

Okay, so we are going to pause right here. We're going to take a very short break. Do not go anywhere. Because you know the types of questions I'm going to be asking about dreams when we come back. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by my very own labor of love my most recent book relaunch. This book is a collection of my stories, other stories and is a motivational guide to living a new three h q lifestyle, sparking your heart to ignite your life. It's available for purchase via Amazon, get ready to try on the three HQ method that I've been using for years throughout my entire life reaching the next level in all areas, both professionally and personally. Get your copy today at www dot the relaunch book.com Hey everyone, welcome back. Are you on like pins and needles the edge of your seat because I know I am. This is the stuff that I love. To hear more about. We're talking about dreams, specifically, how you can start to really track your dreams so that you can answer specific questions that you have. I am here with Linda shriller and we are going deep, she is an expert in all things dreams. So before we went on break, which by the way, you're going to want to hear that previous story, she said that we have five to seven dreams every night, and they're around REM. So a lot of times, as you said, Linda, we wake up in the middle of the night, we can remember those, but the most common ones are the ones in the morning. So let me ask you this question. You know, I have a husband who wiggles all around and gets up in the middle of the night. And so I feel like you know, my sleep is a little bit like sporadic. And then when I wake up in the morning, I have a really tough time remembering my dreams. I really have a tough time is this common? That sometimes I'm like, I don't even know if I'm dreaming.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:19:01

It is it is so common and so ubiquitous. And there are many, many reasons why we might have trouble remembering our dreams ranging from we're not getting a deep Grenache getting into REM sleep. We're not getting a deep enough sleep if for whatever reason whether we have a wiggly partner, or our cat or dog jumps on the battle alive, or we have a lot of anxiety if we're just not sinking into that deep restorative sleep that could be one reason. The then there are many other reasons we have dry spells. Sometimes we just have dry spells where we don't remember our dreams. But in a big part of the reason I think that a lot of people don't is that they don't a value their dreams and be practice the art and skill of remembering them.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:19:57

Hold on, hold on. Let's go into you said value, and then practice. So let's talk about value first valuing your dreams. What does that mean?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:20:10

valuing your dreams means that you respect that wisdom, information. knowledge, insight can come to us from many forms and in many directions. If we only think that we can get information in a western oriented left brain scientific, if I can't touch it and prove it, it doesn't exist, form, you're probably not going to be remembering your dreams. Because that's a different form of knowledge and information. So, in from antiquity on from biblical times, and way before the biblical times, all the way up, you know, through ancient times, indigenous cultures, native cultures, the most respected people were the dreamers in the clan with a try to meet the shamans, the leaders, the healers, were consulted before any major event and asked to dream on it. And their dream wisdom was taken very, very seriously. So this is a way of accessing information from our own deeper self from our own unconscious, as well as being able to tune in to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, the larger wisdom available to us in your world, that we have quiet our day chatter in order to be able to receive. So if we value that that's a legitimate and valuable way of gaining information about ourselves in our lives, we will honor our dreams and put attention to them and tell our dream news, thank you, you're important, and I will not just value you, but I will write it down. I will remember you I will put my effort into remembering you in the morning by writing it down ideally in a journal. But if you if you can't write it on your phone, audio recorded into your phone to record later, whatever way you want to honor the Muse by taking it seriously.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:22:14

But sometimes I just have this question. Sometimes the dream is very cryptic. Yes. Oh, yes. figure out like what was that that, you know, wild pig that came in? And then there was a bird that shot down and then I'm flying? And I mean, sometimes we're how do we, and maybe this is the second part of this, then you have this process. But I love the idea. First off, valuing it saying that there is and I'm gonna get to nightmares in a second. But there is this. And I also like what you said with shamans and you know, Dream On in medicine men and all these, you know, people that had to dream on it. I know that, you know, working with shamans, they say I'm going to come to you and dream time, right? And so totally, I love everything. I think that there's so much to be said about tapping into and valuing what information you're getting, and what I heard you say, they also is that when you journal about questions that you have in your life, and then you specifically get really clear on asking that before you go to bed, you then close your journal, close your eyes. And at that point, are you supposed to be thinking about the question as you drift off to sleep? Or is there what is that second part of this the best process for doing this? Sure.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:23:41

So that is an excellent process. I do want to say that the example that I shared in the beginning, that is a uncommon example. Most dreams do not come through either that clearly or that quickly. So partially we have to have patience with our dreams and our dreaming self.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:24:05

Everyone who's hearing that we're I don't want to lose you at this point. Patients sometimes you know, we run for the we run for the doors, right? But no, you have to this isn't an I mean, I know I am still going through the process of really trying to leverage my dreams understand my dreams. And as I said, a lot of times I don't get them until you know weekends I dream far more than any other time.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:24:31

Well, that is very, very common. One of my one of my clients once said that her alarm clock, she called it her dream eraser, your alarm goes off, it wakes you up in the middle of a cycle, not necessarily where you had been dreaming. So if you're one of the people who have to get up for work every day and have and wake up with an alarm, chances are really high that you won't remember your dreams. Unless and until you get to the place where you can wake up when your body's rhythm like on the weekend is ready for you to wake and then you have a much better opportunity and chance really to catch those dreams. So the other thing I want to say about dreams is some dreams come through. And they're full blown stories and there's narrative and things happen. And there's pictures and scenario. And some dreams are one snapshot. They're one image, there's nothing else. There was a dog, dog. That was it. That's your dream. Sometimes dreams come through, and they're only the emotional layer of your dream. So you might wake up feeling inexplicably angry, or inexplicably anxious, or inexplicably delighted. For no particular reason that you can think of except you woke up with that feeling. That's your dream to someone you work with is the emotional narrative of your dream. So you

Hilary DeCesare: 00:26:01

can wake up. And depending on there are some mornings that there is no reason you had a good night asleep, and you wake up and you're just a little salty. are just like, you are saying that you most likely had some type of dream that instilled that in you. Yes,

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:26:23

yes. I agree.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:26:24

100% I love what you're saying,

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:26:27

Oh, good, good. I'm going to turn the light on. It's

Hilary DeCesare: 00:26:29

got ya know, this is this is so this is so incredibly, like, I find that so often that I'll be like, I went to bed early, had a great dinner. I didn't get up, you know, maybe you know, at all. And I slept and I'm like,

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:26:47

why am I so exhausted? Well, you might have been running a marathon in your dream, you might have been fleeing a monster in your dream, you might have been doing something in your dream that were you wild, our bodies make neurochemicals while we're awake and when we're asleep, and it makes a particular biochemical that suppresses our action. So we don't get up and enact everything that we dream about. And when someone's body isn't making enough of that chemical, then we get from sleepwalking phenomena, actually. But we wake up and we remember, we have the feeling state, right? Because dreams are embodied alive experiences that we have in the night. So even though you were lying in your bed, you were very, very busy in some alternate reality, and you feel it in your physical body when you wake up. Even if you

Hilary DeCesare: 00:27:44

can't remember the narrative. I'm feeling that more and more often lately, like I wake up and like, I'm not sure what I'm doing when I'm asleep, but I am very busy. So let me You said something that also I would like to touch upon. And that is, you know, we have nightmares. And we have really, you know, I don't know, their dreams, the happy dreams. And sometimes you really can't tell if something is true or not like I've woken up in the middle of the night. I'm like, like, I feel like it is so true. And I have to kind of get my head about myself. What's going on there.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:28:25

So there's a couple of different possibilities. And one possibility is that you have what are called lucid dreams, which simply means that you're aware that you're saying lucid dreams, lucid, lucid, aware while you're asleep and dreaming that you're asleep and dreaming. So you may be actually still asleep, but aware that you're asleep and dreaming. And that might be one one reason for your being not sure if you're awake or asleep. That would be one possibility. I

Hilary DeCesare: 00:28:58

have that where I fly and I kick my feet. And I literally will wake up and I'm kicking my feet, like Yeah, and I'm fine. Yeah. Okay, so that's one type lucid dreams where you actually are doing that. And then the second one is why.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:29:17

And then also there's this, there are many layers of consciousness between being fully wide awake and being sound sound asleep and deep REM sleep. And one of the layers of consciousness just on either edges of sleep is what Jung called the hypnopompic or the hypnagogic zone. So that's when you're just falling asleep at night, or you're just waking up in the morning and you're sort of got one foot in both worlds still. And that's often the place where we have these dreaming states where we're not sure if we're awake or asleep, because we're sort of both at the at those moments. Those are those that

Hilary DeCesare: 00:29:53

are is that an RM state? REM state it's not

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:29:57

technically or REM sleep, but it comes from it is generated from the same part of the brain from a combination of our Mignolet, our optic cortical cortical sections of the brain that our REM dreams are. So for all intents and purposes, it's the same material as is a deep REM dream,

Hilary DeCesare: 00:30:19

right? So why do we have nightmares?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:30:23

So nightmares can come from many different reasons. And some are sort of normative parts of life. And others come from traumatic experiences that we've either personally experienced, or people around us have experienced. So any of the listeners who have children probably know that many, if not most children go through a period of time, where there's a monster in the closet and a boogeyman under the bed. And that doesn't necessarily mean they're having traumatic experiences. But it's, it's a life stage, it's part of growing up, it's part of a developmental stage. And my theory about that is that when kids are young, everyone is bigger than them. I'm stronger than them and more powerful than them. And they feel disempowered in their lives. Because they are, because people do tell them what to do all the time. So but it kind of makes sense, from our sort of psychological point of view, that kids would be worried about that kind of thing. So that could be one reason, people would have nightmares, hormonal changes in your body. Pregnant women report the craziest wildest dreams they never have before after being pregnant. And various other hormonal changes, medications you're taking prescription or recreational drugs can affect our sleep and our dreams and create the equivalent of a of a bad trip, if you will, while we're asleep. So these are you can eat some food and not digest it well. And that can cause a nightmare too. So these are all part and parcel of what everybody goes through at one time or another in their life. But the most difficult, and the largest emotional valence and nightmares comes when we are reacting to traumatic events that have happened, either recently, or historically in our own lives, or that we've connected to from our family system, or from living in a world where there's a lot of trauma going on. And it's seeped into our consciousness. And it's so much that our system has not been able to fully metabolize it in our waking life. So it goes into overdrive and shows up in our sleeping life and our nightmares and to come through and it's an effort to try to metabolize tried to digest, if you will, the traumatic events we've gone through so that we can come to a place of restoring peace restoring calm, restoring equanimity in our lives.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:32:56

Well, Linda, we have to take another break the Segway segments go so fast. But when we come back, we're going to actually go through a process to help you with both dreaming and your nightmares. This episode is brought to you by my very own labor of love my most recent book relaunch. This book is a collection of my stories, other stories and is a motivational guide to living a new three h q lifestyle, sparking your heart to ignite your life. It's available for purchase via Amazon, get ready to try on the three h q method that I've been using for years throughout my entire life, reaching the next level in all areas, both professionally and personally. Get your copy today at www dot the relaunch book.com Hey, everyone, and welcome back. And I know you want so many of your questions answered and I'm trying to do the best job I can because we have Linda for only one more segment here. And I want to make sure that I ask this. Linda in all your experience have you ever found someone who just can't dream and remember it?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:34:13

Well, there's guess the Everyone dreams every night. And yes, I have met people who say I just can't remember my dreams. And there's two ways you can deal with that. One is you can practice and if you put your attention on a wanting to remember your dreams and value in your dreams and spending a few minutes every night, writing down something as simple as I intend to remember my dream. I plan to record or write down what I have remembered. I honor this process. It's like any other muscle you can you can strengthen it right when we start lifting weights, we're not starting lifting 50 pounds. We're starting maybe with five pounds and gradually building up. So with practice, you will begin to remember your dreams. If you want to that's one, two, as we were talking about before, learn to recognize what is a dream. A dream might be a narrative story with a beginning, a middle and an end. And you may dream might be a puck on one image, a dream may be one word, a dream could be a physical sensation that's not accounted for by something in your current immediate environment, or simply an emotion that you work with. Are those are dreams. honor each one, write those in your journal too. And if you wake up, and you have that sensation or feeling, I think I had a dream that I remember nothing about it, write that in your journal write had a dream, I can't tell you how many times I've written just had a dream, just to honor the process to keep you know, they

Hilary DeCesare: 00:35:47

keep saying write it down, write it down. So there is this dream journal aspect that you are a huge fan of like you got to write this stuff down. You can't just go to bed and say I want to remember my dreams in the morning. And then in the morning, you say I can't remember my dream. As you said, even just understanding that hey, something happened in the middle of the night, I'm feeling this way, something went down, acknowledging it, right.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:36:10

And if you are in the shower, later, you've jumped out of bed, your alarm and off, you're in the shower, and you go, Oh my god, I had a dream. Try to record re review that dream in your mind while you're in the shower. And then as soon as you get out of the shower, then write it down. It's never too late. One of my favorite tricks for remembering or catching a dream that you you know, you had somehow in there, but you can't remember is what's called positional memory. Go back and lay down in your bed and put your body in the same position that you slept in when you had the dream. And more often than not, you will recall at least parts of the dream, if not the whole thing.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:36:48

That's so good. What about also, you know, as you said, you really, before you start to talk before you grab your phone before you start to think about you know all the things you're grateful for and doing your gratitude practice or your meditative practice, you really should grab that journal and start to write anything you can remember

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:37:11

that that's the best way to remember your dreams is whatever you catch, try to write it down. Whenever it is that you remember it. That's the best way to begin to create a practice and in both of my books in modern dreamwork. And in PTS dreams, each one has a whole chapter on Dream incubation and or tips for remembering your dreams. So there's many things you can do sort of before you go to sleep. And then after you wake up to help you remember your dreams better if that's your goal, including when you wake up, for example, hold very still for a minute before jumping out of bed to kind of set the dream before it slips away. So that sometimes is a tip that will help you remember it or reach around you like you would be wrapping yourself up with a shawl and grab the two ends of your dream. In your hands. You can see I practice embodied dreamwork. So you grab the edges of the room and wrap yourself in it. Like you'd wrap yourself up in a shawl. And sometimes that'll help you reconnect with the joy. Is there

Hilary DeCesare: 00:38:18

a way when you're having a nightmare to get yourself out of the nightmare? What do you suggest? I mean, I I definitely have suggestions that I've given my kids and everything and I do for myself, but what do you as a professional in the dream space? What do you recommend?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:38:32

Well, it's normal to want to get out of there when we're scary. But we have to also remember that nightmares come for a reason. They come with information. And we don't want to miss or ignore the messages, particularly if it's a repetitive nightmare, because our unconscious will just simply escalate and give it to us over and over and over again in more and more strident ways if we're not paying attention and listening. So before going to sleep at night, if you know that you tend to have nightmares, you can do a number of things. You can wrap yourself or you or your bed or your bedroom in a protective cocoon or bubble of light. And pick the color colors it's just right for you. Often some kind of a blue light is the light of the define, but feel free to use white or gold or a rainbow. That's one suggestion before going to sleep to to create a bubble of safety. In my method for dealing with nightmares called the Gaia method which is guided active imagination approach. There are two steps and step one is all about creating safety for yourself before going into the dream and into the nightmare to work on it. And this method I designed is predicated on to two legs if you will. One is Young's guided active imagination approach which is when You will have woken up and you had a dream, then you re enter the dream state and you interact with the characters and the beings and the objects in the dream, to reconfigure the dream to ask questions to make sense out of it. The other leg in this method, though, is best practice trauma treatment. And because I'm trained in EMDR, and a variety of other energy and psychology and somatic ways of working, I know that we have to feel safe, before we move into what we would call the belly of the beast of working with the traumatic images and nightmares, or run the risk of re traumatizing ourselves. So that's the last thing we want to do. So step one in the Gaia method walks you through creating a posse of safety for yourself before you deal directly with the traumatic material. And also, in traumatic events in our lives. Very often, we either are or feel alone. And when people are victimized or abused or harmed in some way, or experienced natural disasters, or war theaters, at the moment, or moments of the trauma, they are alone, it's happening to them. So part of healing from a nightmare is to know you don't have to do it alone. This time. You can work with a friend, a family member, you can work with a therapist, particularly if you know you've had a trauma history, you can work with a dream circle, I've had my own personal dream circle for almost 40 years. And I run dream circles and teach other people that I love that idea of goals. It's like having your your posse there. Because we all have blind spots, right? And none of us can see the back of our own heads without at least two mirrors right one of the front lines back. So when we work with other people, we get other perspectives on what those confusing, metaphoric, symbolic layers of our dream might be. Because our colleagues and friends and family have therapists, if their dream workers will have associations that might be relevant and helpful to us, too. And vice

Hilary DeCesare: 00:42:09

versa. So totally makes sense. One last question I have to ask daydreams are gay dreams the same as night dreams.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:42:18

Most daydreams, the way we generally think about them are not the same as night dreams. Daydreams are kind of like you're spacing out. It's kind of like a reverie. It's, it's an altered state of consciousness to be sure. But you're not really accessing the sleeping information in the same way. You might be sitting in a classroom, and you're supposed to be learning math, and instead, you're thinking about going on your next beach vacation, and it's lovely. But that's not exactly the same of a dream, as a dream. But if you're experiencing waking dreams, which are attending to the signs and synchronicities in your life, that could be another whole hour for us when we have more time. But those kinds of dreams, while we're awake, have the same kind of information embedded in them as the ones that were asleep. So I would differentiate between those two things. And does

Hilary DeCesare: 00:43:15

it do you have a certain amount of sleep that you recommend that helps with dreaming and pulling out more dreams?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:43:26

Most adults don't get enough sleep. We live in an era of the you know, sleep deficit pandemic, along with the corona virus pandemic. And most adults really need about set minimum seven hours sleep. But if you're getting less than five, or six of the rare person can get by on five, my husband, God bless them can get by on six, I've always jealous. I really need my eight hours. I'm an eight hour girl too. And like I can get behind on those rare occasions. Oh, my God, I'm in heaven. But yeah, if you're not getting at least six hours of sleep, the chances are that your body mind system is not relaxing enough from the tension to hell during the day to move into the REM states, and you won't get as many dreams that

Hilary DeCesare: 00:44:13

and what about alcohol? Does alcohol avoid that REM sleep?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:44:19

Yeah, alcohol will change our well we know alcohol changes our consciousness when we're awake. And it does the same when we're asleep. Which isn't to say, Never Have a drink. But know that if you're drinking right before going to sleep, it's very likely that it could have an effect on both the quantity and the quality, meaning what kind of dreams you will have as well.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:44:42

This has just been so interesting. And one of the things that if you wanted to start a dream circle, like what how do you even begin that process?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:44:54

You get together with a few other people that you think would have So be interested in. And that's how I started in this. I had a friend moved to the Boston area. And say I she moved up from New York and said, I don't miss anything about New York City, but my dream circle. So I'm going to start one in Boston, will you be in my dream circle? And I just said, Yes. And then my next question was, and what's the dream circle? I knew to say yes to this. But basically, you're talking to people who are interested in attending to and exploring their dreams with a few other people are really good numbers somewhere between four and six people. And then there aren't very many rules. I mean, basically, it's about confidentiality, how often you're going to meet whether or not you want to have a facilitator who's like in charge, or you want to rotate it. So whether you're a self help group, kind of, you know, a self involved group where you want to have someone facilitating or leading. And sometimes I've worked with people to like jumpstart their groups, they'll have me come in, get them started for, you know, four or five sessions, and then they're, they're off and running on their own. But basically, people just bring their dreams each week, you journal your dreams.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:46:06

And as we know, there's there's different images that mean certain things, right? Like, give us one example of one image that means something.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:46:15

Oh, my goodness, let me ask you for an image that you've ever had. Because every as we said before, dreams are are contextual. And they're also idiosyncratic, right. So some we live in, in a cultural context. So, you know, if you have associations to water, for example, we often talk about how water often has to do with the emotions, but it could be any different type of

Hilary DeCesare: 00:46:43

fly. I fly in, like all my dreams.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:46:48

So So you have associations to flying. And if I'm sitting with you and watching you right now, and you just told me I fly and all my dreams, your face lit up. Oh, I love it.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:46:59

Right. That's my superpower. I always say that. If I could do it, I do it. I do it at night. I fly.

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:47:06

Right? So for you and probably for most people flying in dreams has to do with a sense of freedom and self assuredness and I'm looking at your poster over your shoulder where you're literally you're off your LaunchPad right you've relaunched you're flying around. So it's no wonder that you would fly so much if if launching is your whole

Hilary DeCesare: 00:47:30

great point. So Linda, as we're wrapping up how can people get in touch with you figure out if they want to start a dream circle work with you? How can they reach you?

Linda Yael Schiller: 00:47:40

Thank you. Well, I have a website for my books and then a website for my general practice for the dealing with nightmares and trauma. The website is Pete WWW dot P T S dreams all one word, that calm and then the general book about dream are called Modern dream work. And if you're a fan of The Wizard of Oz, that book is structured around dreams bringing us home to where deep itself. So the journey Hope is the theme of that one. And that one is www.moderndreamwork.com/. Again are one word. And then my personal website is Linda Yael Schiller, which is spelled li N D A Yael S C H I L L E R lindayaelschiller.com/.

Hilary DeCesare: 00:48:33

And then we'll make sure all these links so that people can reach out to you. And what a pleasure. This has been so unbelievably cool. I could talk to you for hours more because I'm truly fascinated by dreams by nightmares by why we do it. And I love that you said five to seven times. And so thank you so much for being here. And next week. How about this, I'm going to be talking to a woman who actually found out her purpose in life through Mother Teresa. And we're going to be talking about transforming your relationship with money. How about that all in one episode, so look forward to seeing you all next week, or having you tune in. And again, live now. Love now, relaunch now. See you next week.