30: Dreams: A Guide to 24-Hour Consciousness with Penney Peirce

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Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am overjoyed to get to be interviewing Penny Pierce a second time. The first round we talked about intuition and frequency and today we're talking all about dreaming. Quick reminder on Penny. She's a respected and gifted intuitive empath with deep psychological understanding, visionary ability and business sense, which is really what I love about Penny's work. Her books have had a huge impact on my life. Intuition, Frequency and Leap of perception all go together. Today we're talking about another of her books called Be the Dreamer, not the A Guide to 24 Hour Consciousness. Penny, welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Let's jump right in. What is 24 hour consciousness?

It's like, I think it's important for us to realize that not just conscious during the day, that there are different kinds of consciousness and maybe we're not as conscious during the day as we are at night, I'm not sure about that, but that the soul is the one who's becoming conscious in this dimension so that we go through the day and then at the end of the day we process a lot of things we've been doing during the night and we re access parts of ourselves that we're trying to bring back into our lives and then we work it in the physical world and we learn things and then we process it again in the higher realm. So it's like a cycle that goes around and around. Because the old idea is that at night we're unconscious.

A lot of scientists even think that dreaming is just some kind of electrochemical process in the brain. But I think that at night the soul is rejuvenating the personality. So it's all.

Yeah, that's what I find so interesting about your perspective that I listened to a Radio lab episode a while ago that throughout the day our brain makes sticky notes. And dreams are kind of processing in a way, these meaningless sticky notes. But what your book makes clear and your philosophy is that dreams were actually very well respected in many ancient times and cultures, and that there's more to it than that. It's not just random synapses firing. It's actually. I love what you just said about our soul's time to work through what has happened during our waking hours.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, we're always the soul, but while we're awake in physical reality, it's very easy to forget that because we're so attached to the left brain view of life. And that is a separatist way of thinking. And it's, you know, it allows things to become physical. But at night, you move more into the right brain and out beyond, you know, this limited perception we have in our daily life and we remember who we really are.

How can people start paying more attention to their dreams and even remembering them in the first place?

First, I think you have to really want to. And stop saying, oh, I don't dream, or oh, I don't remember my dreams. I mean, stop with the negative declarative statements. Then get in touch with the idea of how fun it will be to understand your dreams and to see what you're doing at night. Because to me, the dream realm is real. We are doing things there. And to get a sense of what our higher self or higher functions of our consciousness are attempting, it's a wonderful way to peek in at that. So get motivated really, is what I'm saying. Then have a vehicle for recording your dreams. So in order to, you know, you can access them, but then you have to bring them back, make them conscious and physical by writing them in a journal or recording them, you know, and then looking at them and seeing, well, what does that symbol mean? So a lot of working with dreams means having to learn to interpret symbols. So that's a huge part of it. And that's an intuitive art.

Yeah, I want to come back to the symbology piece because there's a lot to say there just to get everyone on the same page. Can you give a little background too on the phases of sleep and when we're most likely to dream?

I don't remember the exact technology of it, but we go through various phases of kind of light sleep and then we go deeper and deeper and then we come back up again and then we go back down again. And it's really during that kind of in between stage where we go into REM sleep where the rapid eye movement occurs where the body is somewhat paralyzed at that point. But you're very busy running around out in the other realms is what I think.

So it's during those times that you do dream and then when you stop dreaming, the body then rolls around in bed or whatever and it's very active, but we're not dreaming. It's kind of like one or the other, the physical or the non physical takes predominance. But there's a period, a third cycle. Usually I think there are about three cycles of dreaming and the deepest one is early in the morning before we wake up, where you get into really, it's almost like we spiral down and we get into the deepest level right before we wake up. So of course, with a lot of the insomnia we have today, and I don't think we're all dreaming as deeply as we used to, I have a.

Vague sense that my dreams are really strong in the late morning. I don't know if it's just because it's when I'm closest to waking up that I remember those the best, but for anyone, any app geeks you can use. Sleep Cycle is a great app that tracks the phases of your sleep. You can see when you're in light sleep, when you're in deep sleep. And then they have a companion app called Power Nap, which I think I read that it's like a 45 minute at least nap, but that a lot of people will dream when napping if they can get into that REM place and remember their dreams more often.

Yes. For some people, that period can be a very intense, concentrated deep time. A friend of mine used to do out of body experiences while he was napping in the afternoon.

Wow.

Yeah.

One of the things that you advise. I feel like a kindergartner ever since I started reading your work a year ago. I'm like a dream kindergartner. Okay. In terms of all of this stuff. And it's not for lack of trying, it's just Challenging, like I'm noticing I have to break myself, I've had to break myself of a couple bad habits. One, not writing them down, but two, not reaching for my phone or some book or something that should distract me the moment I, I wake up. That can be challenging. So what do you recommend? The first moments that someone is waking up, what can they do to remember and even start to interpret their dreams?

Well, let's back up even to the night before. Because when we talk about 24 hour consciousness, there's this kind of cyclical thing we can do, and that is at the end of the day you can review your day and see what did I accomplish and what didn't I accomplish and what would I like to do tomorrow and how would I like to feel tomorrow? So you're sort of setting a kind of.

Intention, I guess, or a desire, a suggestion in your subconscious. And then once you've completed the day, you can program your ideas for what you want to do during the night. So then I'd like to dream about this, or I'd like to help solve a problem in my dreams about this and open up to see what you can get from the dream state. And there are various rituals that you can do to do that. So then you dream and in the morning you're completing the night experience by first staying kind of quiet. When you first wake up, give yourself a moment before you just launch out of bed.

And just think for a moment almost like, what am I thinking about right now? What was just happening? How do I feel? Is there an emotional residue? And often you'll be able to stay in the dream a little bit and bring it back with you. If you can't remember a dream, then I always say make one up.

Or think of the first thought of the day and write that in your journal. Because the subconscious wants. If you say I want to remember my dream in the morning when I wake up and you don't, but then you write something down anyway, the body gets the sense that, oh, okay, she means it, you know, so okay, I might as well do it then. And so after maybe three tries, you'll start remembering your dreams.

I think it's also so important what you just said about not having an all or nothing approach to this, because sometimes I wake up and the dream sort of slips out of my fingertips and then I'm frustrated, like, oh man, I missed it. So I don't write something down. When really what you said about what's the emotional residue or general tone or even one symbol, what is One thing from the dream that you can write down and work with. And then that's where you've said intuition can come into play and you can, you can work with it from just that small of a starting point. It doesn't have to be remembering a full narrative of what happened the last four years.

That's right, yeah. That's called working with dream fragments. But often it's very easy to write down as part of a scene or a symbol, an animal, a person, an activity that you felt like you were just in, or a place you were just visiting, and keep a journal by the bed and make a quick note. But sometimes if you leave a little extra space in your journal, you can come back later in the day and fill it in. Because quite often when you're in an absent minded moment throughout the day, you'll start to remember a bleed through from what you were doing in the dream state.

And so I often remember a lot of the dream later in the day.

I've even had the experience where I wrote something down that seemed totally random. Maybe a name, a word that I didn't even know. Just make something up. And then days later I would see something very coincidental spelled almost the exact same way. And it's fun to treat them like clues. But then during our waking hours it's like, okay, I don't know what that means today, but I might know in the next few days or in a week.

That's right, I still have. I had one not too long ago where I was staying in apartment number 909. And I was like, and I said it out loud in the dream. So that was why I remembered it in the morning when I woke up. And I'm still waiting. I have thoughts about what 9:09 means, but I'm waiting to see how the physical world matches up with that, you know, and sometimes it takes a while. It's not just that week, it may come a little bit later.

One thing you talk about is different levels of dreaming. And I'll go through periods where my dreams are quite stressful. And it's clear that my subconscious is working out something. And I think I have it handled during the day. But night after night the dreams are stressful or concerning. And I would imagine that that may be part of the reason people don't want to even interpret their dreams is that if they're in a phase where the dreams are stressful or working something out or scary so maybe are unresolved. You know, it seems like there are phases that we go through where our dreams are kind of like they're not as fun, right? It's like, oh, Alice in Wonderland, tromping through this adventure. So can you speak a little bit to levels of dreams and why it feels like sometimes we remember these stressful dreams?

I think we have to understand that all dreams are basically data about our own personal process of growth and evolution. And if you've had, like, sometimes nightmares are just remnants of, you know, past life traumatic experiences or deaths where they were unresolved, like, you know, dying in a fire or something. And then you'll have these nightmares about it because you didn't complete it in the previous incarnation. So some of these things are about clearing yourself so that you can start to get your soul's information coming through unimpeded. That's the same thing we do in waking reality, really on a spiritual path. A lot of the spiritual growth is about removing the blockages to understanding who we really are. It's not about developing ourselves more. It's about just removing all the things where we tell ourselves we're not perfect.

The yes buts. And the same thing happens in dreams. So what you're saying about stressful dreams are simply things that have to do with us confronting those contracted states of mind, belief systems, fears, avoidances, whatever. You know, for instance, when you. A lot of people dream about being chased by an enemy or a monster or something, and you wake up often just like from that. But if you can reprocess that dream the next day, for instance, and go down and relive it and then stop in the dream and turn and face the monster and let it catch up and say, well, what do you really want? And then it'll tell you. And it's just a part of yourself that hasn't been heard, really. And then you find out, oh, okay, it's not bad at all. It's just unknown. It was just, you know, needed to be known.

And you get into this way of recontextualizing things that seem negative so that you really understand that they are quite positive.

It's also, I think, where intuition comes in, where we think, oh, I've worked that out or I'm good. And then this theme repeats in the dream over and over, and it's like, well, maybe there's more to look at. So I think it can be an interesting catalyst for some of that inquiry too.

Yes. And what happens also as we grow spiritually and clear our own fears, we start to become aware of collective fears, and then that becomes personal. So in a way it does repeat, but at different levels on the spiral. And our job is just don't buy into it, you know, okay, let it go again. Turn it back in. Turn the fear into love every single time. Get the understanding and clear the blockage, which is a contraction of energy, you know, so that we have flow again. And so whether it's in the waking dream that we call daily life, you know, or in the nighttime dreams, it's the same process.

You know.

And I think what's underpinning your whole philosophy is that dreams, again, dreams are meaningful and they're information, it's. They're not to be discarded. And in our current culture, it's kind of like dreams are the most thing you could talk about, but you're actually encouraging people to say, talk about your dreams, make them real.

Well, in our culture it's so right now, left brain, science based, information based, that the right brain and art and music and all that kind of thing has kind of been carved out of the schools and so forth. So.

To me, dreaming is the art of working with imagination. And imagination is the real world. When you're in the spiritual world, that's it. It's all imagination. You work by focusing your attention on things and they come into existence and you take your attention off of them, they go out of existence and.

They don't have to become all the way down in vibration to the physical world. But in imagination, you can create things at a high frequency and it's fun. And so that's what we're doing in dreams. We're going from one imaginal reality to the next. Except it's real there.

It's so fun. I agree with you. Just we talked on our last podcast about our brain during our conscious waking hours. We're not even using it to nearly its full capacity. And that's why I love your concept of 24 hour consciousness, that there's so much more to explore of what's going on in our inner realm and that dreams are a huge gateway to that and it challenges us because we are so left brained oftentimes during the day and that dreams are kind of not having that.

Yeah, part of that is it shows us not that there's so much more in that realm, which of course there is, but also how big we are, how amazing we are, how much access we have truly to an unlimited amount of knowledge and energy and creativity and freedom. You know, when you work with the dream world, you start to see your spiritual self, you know, and that's not airy fairy, that's real. And the more you can inhabit those concepts of the spiritual self while you're in the physical world, in your body, in your ordinary life, you then become like a genius. You know, I mean, it's like suddenly you stand out because you access more knowledge, you have more creative ideas, you know how to get them done and you know, it just pays off. So it's very practical.

You were talking about you can program your dreams, you mentioned that earlier, and you can program them for creativity or problem solving. And that also sort of ties into the concept of lucid dreaming. So I'm wondering if you can explain what lucid dreaming is for those who don't know and some initial thoughts on it. Because I have not been successful at this yet that I know of, but I find it fascinating.

Yeah, I have not been as successful as some other people I know, but I'm sure everybody's probably had the kind of dream where, you know, you're dreaming while you're in the dream. You know, like I said, I said that word 909 out loud in my dream, almost like so that I would remember it when I woke up.

So lucid dreaming really is where you wake up within the dream and then you can manipulate the dream at will. And you know, some people say, well, you can imagine trying to look at your hand and have a. This as a mechanism that as soon as you see your own hand in a dream, you wake up.

A lot of shamans work with this, of course, Don Juan and all these things.

And I think it's a wonderful idea and a parallel for how about we wake up in this dream of our daily life and become enlightened.

The same thing. If you can wake up in a dream, in the nighttime dream, you can do it during the daytime too. And then be a soul directed person, not an ego directed or a left brain directed person. So I think that's all about spiritual enlightenment, which is just memory of who we are. Right. It's not like some far off thing.

When you say become a soul directed person, what would that look like during the day, during our waking hours?

I think that would look like being really one with the flow, being in the moment so much that you didn't project ahead with your willpower and your anticipation of what you think things are going to look like. But you have a strong sense of how you love to feel and how you love people and the world. And then you trust the flow and the collective consciousness, which I think is the flow really to bring you whatever you need as new ideas or resources or friends or whatever. And then you go ahead and do it and trust yourself to do it. You put it back out in the world and it goes somewhere and gets to the people it needs to. And so there's like this perfect fit resource and talent and giving things away and receiving what you need. And the soul does what it loves. So that it's like you get the feeling that everything that you've ever worked for and paid dues for and that you deserve, you're going to get it and that you actually have it and you're having fun doing it. I mean, it's. To me, it's like self entertainment.

Right. You know, speaking of the flow and leaning into that, I find it easy to go with the flow. And things are good, things are popping, coincidences are happening, serendipity is on my side. And then I've pondered this question over the years, which is, what do you, you know, what does that mean when it feels like you're in a lull? Which is something you and I have talked about as well. And you, you've not really done anything differently, but it's just this lull of a time and it just doesn't feel very flowy or the flow doesn't feel very fun. How do we manage those times?

What I've noticed for myself is that when I get into a lull or a liminal space.

It'S not that the flow is gone, but I start noticing smaller, detailed kinds of things. My attention focuses down and into the moment in a different way. When there's a big flow going on and you're like skipping along the ripples on the stream and it's all entertaining and fun and movement, that's a whole different feeling. And often it's more shallow when you have a lull, it actually gives you the opportunity to go into your being. And so your consciousness has the potential for deepening and also maybe spreading out in this underworld space, you know, where the inner world space and for great levels of comprehension.

It reminds me of the Rilke quote, which I opened my book with, that life has not forgotten you, it holds you in its hands. And that these lulls are bringing new information too. It's just a different kind of listening and it's a different quality being like you said, it's. Yeah, it's not. Maybe we wouldn't label it fun because we're not used to it, but maybe there's a way to see it as fun in a different way.

Yes, I mean, I think I was mentioning to you I'd had a kind of a food poisoning thing recently where I sort of realized that I couldn't eat the sort of foods that I usually eat because I knew they were going to make me sick, sicker. So I started eating just one thing, like an apple, and then feeling how that felt. Oh yeah, okay, my body likes that. And then maybe I'd eat a piece of toast. Yes, okay, my body likes that. But should I eat an egg? No, that's. No, it's too greasy. So it's like I was able to slow down because of the getting sick and actually put my consciousness on things in a different way. And I learned a lot, you know, that I wouldn't have learned when I had an abundance of food and going out to eat all the time. Because it's the same with the dreams. When you.

Frustrating or upsetting dreams or snagged dreams, it's kind of the same thing. When you go to interpret the symbols or the flow or the process that was going on in the dream, you can then see, well, how is this dream like my daily situation or what I'm doing in my daily life? Because the process of your growth is going to be the same both at the daytime level and the nighttime level, in the physical and the non physical.

Let's talk about symbology for a moment. I have a dream dictionary. I think it says on the COVID 10,000 Dreams interpreted. And in a way, I love looking my dreams up. But how can we get better at interpreting the symbols in our dreams even when we don't have a dream dictionary or the Internet handy?

First thing is, like I said before, everything in your dreams is about your own personal process of growth.

And second, every level of symbology is both about your daily life and what's going on. So in other words, about a personal level of process and about more of a collective level of process. So for instance, right before 9 11, I had a dream that I was flying up to the top of a really, really high skyscraper. And in New York, I think it was, and it was up in the clouds and I looked at all the people sitting at their desk and I thought, oh, these people are not grounded. So I went down and flew down and I got all these river rocks, little round river rocks. And I kept flying back and forth and putting a rock at everybody's desk so that they would have a touchstone so that they could be connected with the earth. And then suddenly I got really worried and I flew down underneath the earth, the floor, thinking, this is Going to make this too heavy and it could cause structural damage. Then I realized, oh my God, the building could fall down. Now I did not know that was a dream about 9 11, but I thought at the time it had to do with the nature of the business world being too mental, being too much up in the left brain and in the analytical state and they weren't in the right brain and they weren't grounded and they weren't in touch with what's actually going on in the earth. Well, so it's both right. 911 was a symbol of the same thing in some ways. So you can interpret your dreams at a number of levels and they are probably all accurate. So there's not just one right answer. So that's another thing. But when you look at a symbol.

Let'S see, you know, so let's take. Well, give me a symbol.

Here's a really random one. About a month ago, I had a dream there was a multi layered bat tracking me while I was walking around in the stream. So that was like a very powerful, memorable scene.

What did it look like? What kind of a multi layer?

My friends made fun of me when I told them this, so that's why I'm laughing. It was like a bat, but it had three pairs of wings. So it had a lot of wings and it was, I think I was in different colors. It was mostly black and it was kind of foreboding but not really like it was tracking me and it knew where I was going, but then it wasn't necessarily trying to attack me.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that the bat is sensitive first of all, as an archetypal pattern. It's sensitive about tracking. I mean, it can use sonar and it can fly around in the dark and not have any problem banging into anything. So it probably has something to do with your own higher perception or your own perceptual abilities at this higher level. So it's a part of you.

Very interesting.

A triple layer could be that it has the capacity to be looking at three levels of frequency, for instance, simultaneously.

So if you were to role play the bat, you know, come back out of the dream and in the morning go in and become the bat and see what am I paying attention to. You would learn a lot about what you're actually doing right now or what you're noticing right now.

I remember I did this because of reading your book, that I had a dream. I think it might have been a white rabbit. And at first I didn't know what to do. With it. And then later in the day, I thought, aha. It's like I'm chasing the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. I'm reaching for something that isn't in flow. It's not meant to be. And it was so helpful. And that was a combination of the dream symbol. But plus my interpretation that sort of hit me later that day or thinking of situation.

Well, it's a good example of the fact that dream symbols can have a personal meaning and an archetypal meaning. So you were going into your personal meaning for the rabbit of having it relate to the children's story. Right, But. Or even, what was it, the. The Jefferson Starship song.

But I think if you just went into the archetypal feeling of what a rabbit is, it has always to do with fertility and, you know, that sort of easy reproductivity and all that and white being purity. So that if you're chasing that rabbit, if you're, you know, wanting more of that, it's almost like the spiritual abundance. Do you know?

Mm. Well, that's what I find interesting, even about reading dream interpretation stuff online. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the validity of this stuff that in a way, it seems like some of these symbols could mean, you know, when they say it's a snake. Okay. It could mean fear, it could mean sexuality. It could mean all these different things. And says who? Who wrote these dream dictionary definitions?

Well, I wrote one of them.

This is true. Good point.

Actually, I had the same question after I wrote originally the Be the Dream or Not. The dream was a Dummies book. It was Dreams for Dummies. So I reworked that. But I also. Then they wanted me to write a dictionary, a dream dictionary.

And what I did when I researched that is it came up with the same thing you did. It's like a lot of these meanings came from the 1800s or something where everybody was much more superstitious and they were just relaying old meanings that came from the Middle Ages or something, not about transpersonal consciousness and psychology and transformation and growth. So what I did was interpret each symbol as though, what would this mean if it were part of my physical process of growth or transformation? What would it mean if it were part of my emotional process? And what would it mean if it were part of my mental, spiritual process? So.

It gives you. And it was all a real intuitive exercise to do each one of these, to see how that thing became a process itself at different frequencies.

So no symbol is that same that it only is, like, one thing. Hang a second. I'll grab that book for a sec.

Sure.

Let me see if I've got rabbit in here.

Okay. Rabbit here, I said in the physical means that you're focusing on fertility, sexuality, the proliferation of work or self expression or increasing your abundance. A rabbit in the garden means you're experiencing the subtle destruction of your efforts and resources or a setback in person personal growth. You're running from problems. If it's at the emotional level, you need to be less soft and docile, passive and naive. You need greater humility and vulnerability. You feel you're the victim of predators or have been wounded by life's basic insensitivity. You feel criticized, hunted down or hounded. You want to be petted and cared for. If it's at the mental spiritual level, you are unwisely idealistic. You believe in luck. You are sacrificing yourself or something precious for the good of others. Going down the rabbit hole means you're looking inside to find your deepest self and the origins of the universe. A white rabbit means magical and spiritual awakening.

So there I did think through.

Yes, on many levels.

Yeah. But I had never seen any other dictionary that actually went into to.

This kind of becoming the symbol in order to understand what it is as a state of being or a process or state of mind.

Yes, that's a really helpful journal exercise which I've done a few times. And again with all of this, I think consistency is key, so that's on my homework list. But journaling, you have some journal prompts as the symbol. What am I here for? What am I? What do I care about? What am I here to teach? You know, I thought that was really interesting to just once you're awake, journal from the perspective of this.

Yes, yes. And I think a lot of the work is done after the dream with redreaming the dream and either. I mean, for instance, in a scary dream you can add an extra character in, you know, and then let that character interact with you and the scary thing and give a new perspective because all the parts are still you. Now that's a great technique. And another thing is you can extend the dream from the point where it stopped and see where it wants to go and what happens next. Or you can back it up before the point where you started remembering it and see what led to it. And it's just in your imagination. You're making it up, but it's still dreaming it. It's really no different. It's coming from the same place. And you get incredible insights from that or from what you were saying of just going in and role playing the symbol and saying, well, what am I good at? What is my expertise? What do I know about what are my fears? What are my strengths?

Shifting gears a little bit. You mentioned earlier on this call and in the book you say that ancient cultures like Egyptians, Babylonians truly believe that this was our soul's time to travel and go do things. The soul is fully awake and doing things in our dreams. I'm curious if you could share your thoughts on interacting with other people in our dreams. Let's say people we know in real life. Is there ever a scenario where we're communicating with another person or are we just making it up based on our own consciousness and what we interpret that person saying?

Yeah.

I think.

A couple things. One is I actually had a friend back in California who was a spiritual teacher. And we decided that we were going to try and connect with each other in the dream state. So we set up this experiment and I think we did it every night for a week. And then we got together and our dreams were remarkably similar. And we had similar animals that came in and talked to us. And they were the same animals. I guess we were role playing or something. But absolutely, the activity that happened and the messages that were exchanged were identical. So we knew that actually we could do that and meet there also. I mean, probably everybody's had some foreshadowing of a person they were going to meet through a dream state and then that person actually shows up. And I believe that we are actually meeting that person and starting to connect in the energy world first and getting ready for it to show up in the physical. And those things happen routinely in dreams. So if you dream about a friend, I think it's real. So if I do dream about somebody, I always call them the next day and tell them I had a dream about you. Do you want me to tell you about it? Because you never know what kind of secret things are going on inside their mind and maybe you're tapping into something that they might need to. To know about. So yes.

And you have specific advice or guidance around. If you're going to call a friend and tell them that you have a dream, how should one approach that?

You mean to tell them about the dream?

Yeah, you had some interesting notes in your talk about that.

Well, or any insight, actually, any intuitive insight. I always think I just say, look, I had this idea or insight about you, you or thought, would you like me to share it with you? Or had a dream, would you like me to share it. If they don't want to hear it, they'll say no thanks. And if they do, okay, I don't want to force anything on anybody.

And then once you have shared it, maybe you can phrase it a little differently. But I think you said that you ask does that resonate or does that ring any bells or what comes up when I say that? And so that they're sort of co creating it with you, you're not just handing them down some statement or sentence.

Yeah. Or does that make any sense to you, what I said? And then maybe there's a little conversation that can go with it or something. But.

Yeah, or if it's symbolic, maybe. What do you think we were doing last night?

What role does meditation and mindfulness play in dreaming and dream interpretation?

First of all, I think it helps create a quiet mind, which I think we do need in order. First of all, to recall dreams, you need a kind of clarity so that the dreams can just still stay there when you wake up. That they're not actually just disappearing as you shift levels quickly. That you can maintain concentration in states of consciousness. It's a mental skill that we've, we forget about.

And I think also then it allows same thing with interpreting symbols. It allows for that deep quiet that when you ask a question, what does rabbit mean? You start to get those ideas that are the answers that come out of the deep self.

So I think it's a very good adjunct to working with dreams. And even your daydreams, the things that happen to you every day while you're awake are waking dreams. And those can be interpreted.

Yes, I wanted to ask you about that too. Daydreams. What is a daydream and how do we work with those?

You see, I think that even during the day we kind of expand our consciousness out into the non physical realms and into the imaginal realm. And then we come back and bring that information with us. Let's say you're at the desk and you're writing a paper or something and then you access information in order to do that, you space out, you know, then you come back and you have an idea. And daydreams are like that. You have to leave the left brain focus in order to access a bigger reality. And then when you come back, often you've had some kind of imaginative thing that happened.

Some people write it off. I was just on my summer vacation there thinking about it. But maybe there's a feeling state in that summer vacation imagery or a symbol in there that if you looked at it More closely, it might give you a sense of what you might want to do with your new management consulting contract or something.

So all the information is useful no matter what state it comes from. And I think we need to maybe pay attention during the day to when we space out and when we come back. And then we space out and we come back and it's constant at night, we just space out for a longer period of time.

That, to me, is one of the keys of your message in all of your books, which is that it all starts with the openness to information and being open to the different forms that it might take and how it comes to us, and that without that openness, we're missing so much.

Right. Well, again, we're speaking of left brain, which wants things categorized, organized, defined, and has a recognizable form of information, which is data or proof or written word or something like that. But a lot of what we get really doesn't come from what's already known. You know, it comes from this whole magical part of ourselves.

It is. So, I mean, I could really talk to you about this topic for hours too. But it is very challenging, I'm finding. For I ask five reflection questions right before I fall asleep, which are my high of the day, a low of the day, something I want to celebrate, something I'm grateful for, and an unanswered question. And usually my unanswered question might cue up the dream. And I learned this from you to then say, okay, so, you know, okay, dreaming self, please help me remember my dreams once I wake up in the morning, fully rested, so they don't wake you up in the middle of the night and then in the morning trying to write it down. But I have to say, doing all this, it's a practice. It takes practice remembering to write things down. I forget almost every day just trying to kind of take anything from the dream, even the residue. So for anyone listening, it's like I'm having kind of. I'm having a lot of fun just with how challenging it all is. Like, it's not coming easily, but that's kind of enjoyable.

It is. I tried doing the.

Nighttime review, setting up the dream world, remembering the dream world, setting up the daytime world, you know, doing that for full cycle for several weeks. And it does make you very clear. But it is really a lot of practice.

And none of it's difficult, but it has to have a lot of desire with it to discover what's inside that that could be revealed by that practice and not judging.

It's so easy to Want to judge? Oh, that's that dream was worthless. Oh, that didn't mean anything or oh, I didn't remember enough. I won't write anything down or I won't sit with that in my meditation. And it's like just teaching that non judgment and staying open to whatever form is coming in. I think is also takes a lot of practice.

That's right. And the other thing that's interesting, I think in dreams is what I was calling. I think in the book the dream zones where we dream at different frequency levels. Just like we create our reality at different frequency levels too, our physical reality. But we go into mental realms and emotional realms and fear realms and love realms and the collective consciousness of the very high levels, almost like the planetary memory levels. We look at the life purpose and check what we're doing against it. We look at possible paths forward, like potential paths. And we do so much at night and if you can identify what different level you're on, that's I think very useful.

You know, so like sometimes the symbols can reveal that to you. Like being up in that skyscraper. For me, you know, a skyscraper is a building. It's a mental. It's a structure relating to the mind because it's up in the air, which is the mental element. But it's a high, high, high mental plane.

And airplanes, some vehicles are your body while you're traveling in that zone. So if you're in a car, you're in more the physical realm. If you're in a boat, you're in the emotional realm. If you're in an airplane, it's the mental realm. Spaceships, you know, up into the spiritual realm, you know, so you can kind of get a sense of where you're traveling and what level you're exploring by some of the symbols that you have.

So much fun to be had. I love it. Penny, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. For all of you listening.

Oh, my favorite topic.

I know it's so fun. I feel you say this in the book, but dream clubs, even that would be. It's so fun to talk about and interpret and I love all of your expertise on this topic. So for anyone listening, definitely check out Penny's book Be the Dreamer, not the A Guide to 24 Hour Consciousness. Penny, thank you again. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

On my website, which is just pennypierce.com and there's all kinds of information there. There's lots of free information on dreams PD downloadable stuff. So have a look.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And to everyone listening, sweet dream.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Path Pivot Podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit JennyBlake me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter @jennyblake. And remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.