Dream Expert Kelly Sullivan Walden: Why a Nightmare is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Ever dream that you're falling, flying, being chased, or maybe you find yourself in am uncomfortable place or position? Then you don't want to miss this conversation with Dream Expert Kelly Sullivan Walden who has helped thousands of people decode their dreams. Known as Doctor Dream, Kelly is also a clinical certified hypnotherapist, she earned a doctoral degree in spiritual counseling, and she is the bestselling author of ten books, including I Had the Strangest Dream, It’s All in Your Dreams, Dreaming Heaven,  Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and Premonitions, and A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste. Kelly has been featured by ABC, CBS, NBC, Dr. Oz, The Real, The Hallmark channel, The Gaia network and Huff Post and Cosmopolitan and is also the host of The Kelly Sullivan Walden Podcast. Check out her work and join her Dream Team here.

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Transcript

Kelly Sullivan Walden: [00:00:00] I had a therapist that told me a nightmare is a terrible thing to waste. And a nightmare is an unfinished dream. You're the director of your dream. You can finish it the way you want. And that was the moment that my interest in becoming a therapist to help myself and help other people reclaim their dreams and especially nightmares to Learn how to pick them up where they leave off and put on an ending ended in a way that leaves you feeling empowered.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: Hey, it's Michelle. Welcome to Conversations. I'm looking forward to bringing you some new guests in the coming months, but in the meantime, this one is from the vault. You know, those dreams that you have where you're trying to figure out What does that mean? We've all had them, right? Well, hopefully you will get a little clarity from today's guest, dream expert Kelly Sullivan Walden, known as Dr.

Dream. Kelly is also a clinical certified hypnotherapist. She earned a doctoral degree in spiritual counseling and she is the best selling author of 10 books including [00:01:00] I Had the Strangest Dream, It's All in Your Dreams, Dreaming Heaven, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Dreams and Premonitions, and her latest, which is a bit off the beaten path from her former works, Dreams.

Dreams. called A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste. She is also the host of the Kelly Sullivan Walden podcast. Kelly has been featured by a number of national media outlets including ABC, CBS, NBC, Dr. Oz, The Real, The Hallmark Channel, The Gaia Network, and HuffPost and Cosmopolitan. And she has some serious positive energy flowing that made this segment so much fun.

Hope you enjoy my conversation with Kelly Sullivan Walden. 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: So great to be with you, Michelle. Thank you so much for having me on. What a dream. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: Kelly, I am so excited that you're here because we all have things that I think we're wondering about when it comes to our dream life. And who do you ask? Well, I have somebody here right in front of me who is very, very qualified for this question. So before we get into [00:02:00] that, What was it about dreams that got you interested in wanting to follow and pursue a career that some people wouldn't even think of existing? 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Right. It's so funny. I was just at a party last night and I was telling somebody what I did. And they're like, I've never heard of this before.

I said, yeah, it's not common and it's not what I expected to be doing, but I did have a very strong, uh, Dream life as a kid. My younger sister Shannon, and I shared a bedroom. I've got four sisters all together, and, but she and I always kind of shared a bedroom. We shared dreamscapes. We had a lot of tandem dreaming experiences together.

We still do from time to time where we are in the same dream scape and with similar characters and similar things are happening and we compare notes and it's just, it's a phenomenon. So having this. Sort of partner in crime partner and shine helped me to become really interested It was like a game almost we didn't [00:03:00] take it seriously, but it was just something that we did regularly as kids and Over my I'd say through my 20s I kind of went toward Hollywood and all the things that blinged and dinged in the outer world that caught my attention I sort of didn't pay much attention to my dreams during that time.

I had what many call a dream drought. A lot of adults say, Oh, I just don't dream anymore. I used to dream a lot as a kid. Well, that was how it was for me. But I got to a place where I had what would be called a quarter life crisis where I just, I felt so lost and so dis disconnected and untethered from that spiritual essence that I had that I'd counted on.

And I, I really contemplated Not being on the planet anymore. And, um, it was a very dark time in my life. I did, I stayed on the planet thanks to the help of a lot of therapists. I met some shamans, gurus, 12 step programs. I did all of those things. [00:04:00] And finally I started getting my dreams back and the dreams that I began to have were not pleasant.

It was like that saying, what's suppressed must express. So I had these, these dreams that were kind of mad at me for having turned my back on them for a while. A lot of chasing dreams, but I had a therapist that told me a nightmare is. It's a terrible thing to waste. And a nightmare is an unfinished dream.

You're the director of your dream. You can finish it the way you want. And that was the moment that my interest in becoming a therapist to help myself and help other people reclaim their dreams and especially nightmares to learn how to pick them up where they leave off and put on an ending. which is officially called imagery rehearsal therapy if you're in the, in Harvard, but you don't have to be in one of those fancy dream institutes at all.

You can just be in your own bedroom and know that if you wake up from a nightmare, you can pick it up where it leaves off and end it in a way that leaves [00:05:00] you feeling empowered. So that's become the work that I've done, written a bunch of books on the subject. And that brings me to you, Michelle. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: And I'm excited because you have a new book that we're going to talk about that later, because very, very exciting and a little bit off the beaten path from the books that you've had out there before.

So excited to hear about that. I know everybody else out there will be as well. Before we dive into that, I want to just kind of take a step back because I cannot wait to ask you some of these questions. And I have questions from friends, I have questions from the community on social media. So I have questions that are personal.

Bring it all. Give me them all. But before I do that, let me ask you, what is normal and what is not normal with dreaming? I tend to dream a lot, all the time. Is that normal? And if we want to dream, what should we do to fix it? 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Oh, that's a great question. Well, I would say clinically, If we're talking about it from [00:06:00] a scientific perspective, we all dream three to nine big dreams every night.

We spend a third of our lives dreaming, and this is everybody across the board. The issue isn't whether or not we're dreaming for most people, it's whether or not we remember. our dreams. So when somebody like you tells me, Oh, I dream a lot. That means that you remember your dreams. We all dream about the same amount.

I mean, it might vary a little bit from person to person, but the issue is remembering the dreams. And that's the tricky part, because within just a couple minutes of waking up, It's like there's a, there's the passing of the baton in our, when we're in our waking state, our prefrontal cortex is online. Our logic, our reasoning, this is our, our ego.

Our ego itself is online. When we fall asleep, all of that goes to sleep. And it's, and what wakes up is our limbic brain. I touched the back of my head because I imagine this little cave woman self in the back of [00:07:00] my, my brain, more of this primitive aspect, this emotional cortex, the visual cortex wakes up.

So all of the energy that's been suppressed by day or that hasn't gotten dealt with in a satisfying way. It's what suppressed musics must express. So this energy comes out. It's like there was a song back in the eighties. The freaks come out at night. Freaks come out at night. So that's kind of what happens.

Everything that we've been able to do. Like kind of tuck into the, into the closet comes out to play at night. So it's, it's common to have dreams that are intense, that are vivid, that are visual. I like to say it's strange not to have strange dreams. Most people's dreams, even if they have a relatively ordinary context to them.

Like I'm at work, I'm eating my lunch, but then all of a sudden a hippopotamus will walk through the boardroom. So there's [00:08:00] always something that is a little bit odd. There's something like it's my boss, but it's also my babysitter. When I was five, it's my dad, but he's got. Dumbo ears or, you know, there's something so that the anomaly is what to pay attention to.

It's normal to have strange dreams and it's normal not to remember them. The trick is to go out of our way to remember them and to, to grab them. I always say, if you take one step toward your dreams, they'll take 10 steps toward you, but you have to take that one step. Otherwise, even the most brilliant life changing, win the lottery, meet the person of your dreams kind of dream will just be gone if you don't go out of your way to, to take note of it. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: You mentioned, and I know a lot of people have these dreams. They are without clothes in their dreams. What does that mean? 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: I always think our dreams primarily speak the language of symbols. So nakedness is symbolic of being [00:09:00] transparent, being not protected in some way.

Clothes, they're a metaphor of, of the, um, of the roles we play in life. Are we wearing some kind of a uniform? Are we dressed up? Are we wearing something fancy? Are we dressed down, just wearing our flannels? So, our clothes tell us something about the image that we're trying to project. And if we don't have clothes on, then that might mean that we're One of two things.

These, these are the extremes. It could be that we've maybe, maybe we're processing feeling overly exposed. Maybe we said too much in this day and age of social media or on the other side of things. I think that we live in such an interesting time that In some way we should live as if we have no shame in our game.

We, that we should be transparent. Our walk should match our talk. So some of us are naked in the dream and quite comfortable with that. And that's [00:10:00] maybe the goal is if we're going to be naked in a dream, let's be like, yeah, this is me. This is all me. You like it? Come with me. If you don't, then maybe you're not meant to hang out with me.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: Let's talk about something that. I know that I do in my dreaming. Uh, I had a good friend of mine who just shared the same thing and she said, that's so funny that you said that because, and then she went on to explain what she has in her dreams. When you dream about certain locations, so yes, we probably have had different things pop up.

It's your grandmother's house. It's your childhood home. It's your college. It's your home now. What causes us? Because sometimes I'll dream, but it will only be if I've lived in three or four places, it's only been. two of those four places and I always have dreams in those areas. What does that mean when we dream about a certain area over and over again?

Kelly Sullivan Walden: So there's a couple ways of looking at it. 

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Kelly Sullivan Walden: So on one level, Anything that's [00:12:00] recurring in a dream, we could consider that it's something that our subconscious mind is telling us to pay attention to.

Think of it like it's the FedEx delivery guy or gal that's trying to send us a message. And if we don't quite receive the message, then it's going to keep coming back again with that same little slip of paper on our door until we get the message. Once we get the message, it can change. All right, so put that to the side.

There's also a phenomenon. And this is, this is true for our waking selves as well. But in our dreaming lives, we have a playlist of familiar people, places, and circumstances. We're habit makers as human beings by day and by night. So many of us have sleep. certain places that we visit regularly at night.

And some of that is simply force of habit and sometimes it is significant. So we have to ask ourselves, what, what is this? Is it really trying to show me something that I haven't quite gotten to the bottom of, or is [00:13:00] this just part of my playlist of, of the, the ordinary places I go? So I always suggest that we look at it from both perspectives.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: Here's a big one being chased. What does that mean when we're being chased by someone or groups of people? 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Yes, this is, this one is, um, personal to me because I, I have, I became a dream person because of my recurring chasing dreams and I still have them from time to time. So it's common to believe that.

When we dream about something chasing us, it's usually because we think that it's trying to hurt us or kill us. So the most common perspective is that we are trying to outrun an aspect of life, maybe, um, a dysfunctional relationship pattern or a way of being that isn't serving us. We're trying to put distance between ourselves and that thing.

Who or what are we running from? It's a part of our own [00:14:00] shadow. So if we have a dream where we're running from something, we might ask ourselves, what part of myself am I running from? And What gift does it have in store for me? If I was to stop and freeze frame the dream and turn around and look at that energy, that person or people that are chasing me, and I was to put them in their place and turn the tables.

Now I'm chasing you and I'm asking you, what do you want from me or what are you trying to give me that I am being elusive to? Pray. And I'm not receiving this gift that you have. Carl Jung said that the goal of dream work and even the goal of therapy of any kind is to have all aspects of ourselves marching in the same parade at the same time to the same song. Maybe they're all playing different instruments, but they're all self expressed and together. So these chasing dreams are sort of showing us what part is running off this way and running off this way. So we can [00:15:00] wrangle them all together. So we can have this feeling of being whole and complete inside.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: So if we have the parade, we're all going the same line, we're all together, but all of a sudden we're on a float and we start falling. Oh, I love you. You're such a good dreamer. I'm so in there with you. What does falling mean, Kelly? And I had, I had a good friend of mine just asked me this the other day, like, please, because I knew I was talking to you and I told him, like, please ask what it means to fall, because I do that all the time.

Kelly Sullivan Walden: It's super important. Okay. So I'm going to do you're going to notice a pattern with me. There's one perspective and then here's the deeper one. So the typical perspective on falling dreams is that they're symbolic of our fear of failing. So falling is like we're, we're losing step with ourself.

We're out of step. with, with life. We're tripping over ourselves or we're, we're overwhelmed. Here's the deeper, more shamanic way of looking at a falling [00:16:00] dream. There's the Sinoi from, from Malaysia. As reported by an anthropologist in the 1930s, he said in the 1940s, sorry, they believe that there were falling spirits calling us to our depth in our falling dreams so that we might become like trees more deeply rooted and grounded in our power as we walk through our lives.

If you can remember the next time you have a falling dream, Try to stick with it so that you can learn to fall well so that you can land and be like I'm falling Oh, yeah, it's a dream and you land sort of like in the matrix where they just like Slide into place. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: I know a lot of people dream about certain celebrities in their dreams 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Yeah.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: What does that mean? I'm sure there's Or are we just watching the movie the night before and that's what we're coming up with? 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Sure, yeah. There's always the, the [00:17:00] superficial perspective that yeah, this is, this is, this could be triggered by the show I was just watching. But here's the thing. If you have a hundred people in the same theater watching the same show, same TV show, same movie, they're all going to have a different dream. The characters on the screen will show up differently in their dreams based on their own psychology. So, so it's not enough to just say, Oh, it was just what I was watching last night. Celebrities. Okay. From the perspective that everyone and everything is an aspect of the dreamer, we can consider that the celebrity in the dream is a celebrity aspect of ourselves.

So we should ask ourselves, what are the three? Characteristics, three adjectives that describe this person. Are they strong? Are they handsome? Are they gorgeous? Are they smart? Are they sensitive? What do they represent? Consider that they are an aspect of self that may be a clue to your own celebrity. [00:18:00] a clue to how you step out of the shadows and more profoundly into the spotlight of your own life.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: I feel like a broken record because every time I say this is the last question and then I think of another question. I'm like, I have to 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Let's do it for hours. Let's keep doing it. We'll be called the last question till we go. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: Does anything we eat or drink affect our dreams? 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Absolutely. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: Really? 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: I mean, as a principle, what, what affects our bodies affects our minds, what affects our minds affects our bodies.

So it's, it's all in sync. Um, the rule of thumb is to not eat or drink anything heavy right before you go to sleep. You want to have at least a couple hours ideally. I mean, if you have a little protein snack before you go to sleep, that's okay. You don't want to go to bed lightheaded and starving, but you don't want to have a big old piece of chocolate cake right before you go to sleep. That's kind of a recipe for nightmares [00:19:00] actually, and or have a big heavy meal. A lot of people think if they have a nightcap, a little, a little alcohol before they go to sleep, it does make you drowsy and it will put you to sleep, but it won't keep you sleeping well.

My, my rule of thumb is if you need something to get a little bit of peanut butter or a little handful of almonds, something that's protein oriented to stabilize your blood sugar. And that will help you to have the sweetest dreams. The people also recommend vitamin B6 as a way it stimulates your, your visual cortex.

So it makes dreams a little bit easier to catch because it makes them more vivid. So that's a little something tryptophan also helps you to get food that has that's rich in tryptophan is also helpful around Thanksgiving people have really good dreams. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: That chocolate cake does sound really good at two o'clock in the morning, but not not something we want to do. So before 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Not the best thing for dreams. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: Before I let you go, this is very exciting. You have a new book and this is, [00:20:00] as I said before, a little different than what we're used to seeing or reading from you. So tell us about the book. 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Sure. It's called A Crisis is the Terrible Thing to Waste. It's the art of transforming the tragic into magic and what's in common with the other books that I've written.

It's meant to help you. It's meant to give you. It's a. It's a typical self help book in that there's tools in it to help you do better in life. What's different is that these are very, very personal stories that it's like kind of hard for me to even talk about, but some of the most tragic. Stories that have happened in my life where I had a near death experience.

I almost died. I've had, there's been a lot of death in my life. And then a lot of kind of tragedies where one story is where I was on a hot air balloon that crashed in the middle of a wild animal park with the lions not far away. And, you know, just where things fall apart, things that are supposed to be a certain way, they get, they kind of go in the [00:21:00] opposite direction.

And the things that I've learned from those, anything that is upsetting. It stays upsetting if we don't really look at it like kind of, if we're running from that nightmare and we don't really see what's chasing us, we never really grow. But the moment we turn around and say, I'm going to face you, I'm going to look at what this is and really look at it.

That's when we discover the angel in disguise. That's when the transformation happens. I think we need to embrace our shadow and embrace it. Whoever's on the opposite end of the opposite side of the aisle and find some fusion and step into that field of unity and not waste the crises we're in the midst of.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: All right. So go to kelly Sullivan Walden. com. You can find out more information. Kelly. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am looking forward to going to bed and dreaming tonight without the chocolate cake. 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: You are so wonderful. Congratulations. Yeah. And I mean, unless it's dream chocolate cake, if you dream about it, you can eat the cake and you can have it too. Have your own [00:22:00] and then and everybody else's piece too, there's enough to go around for all parts of ourselves. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: Exactly. 

Kelly Sullivan Walden: Michelle, thank you so much and congratulations on your new show and on being such a wonderful dreamer yourself. I'm, I'm so happy to, to know you. Thank you for your graciousness and your interest and all in your beautiful spirit. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much. 

Michelle Dawn Mooney: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kelly Sullivan Walden. I told you she was a lot of fun. If you want to learn more about her books, podcast, or join her dream team, you can visit her website, kellysullivanwalden. com. And if you enjoyed today's episode, I'd love for you to leave a review and feel free to subscribe to the podcast so you can hear more conversations like the one you heard today.

Thanks for listening. And remember, one person can make a difference and that difference maker could be you. We'll see you soon.