Janine Bolon: Welcome back to The Writers Hour. This is Janine Bolon, and I have the honor and privilege of introducing you to a wonderful person, wonderful speaker, and hypnotist, and many more things than that. Her name is Zoilita Grant, and she is with us today from Colorado. One of the things fabulous about this is that dreams have always been important in Zoilita’s life. Not only due to the fact that her 27-year recurring dream, which not only gave her a life purpose, but her dreams introduced her to her children before they were born. Her dreams have shown her things that she needed to learn and directed her to move to Colorado itself. Zoilita Grant has been studying dreams for nearly 50 years, and she looks forward to sharing with you her experiences in her wonderful new book, ‘The Secret Life Of Dreams.’ She encourages everyone to follow their dreams, and may they bring the same insight and learning that she has derived from hers. Zoilita has written and published over 24 books for hypnosis practitioners as well as runs a certification program for hypnotic life coaching. She also did ‘Business and Relationship’ for hypnotic coaches and she just finished a ‘Hypnotic Coaching: Hypnosis For The 21st Century,’ which really explores the emerging field of hypnotic coaching. Zoilita has a whole line of hypnotic mp3s available on iTunes and Amazon, as well as for neuro meditations for beginning, and has a master key, which is a 22 mental rewiring video. She works extensively on Zoom, Skype, and FaceTime, and this was even before the pandemic people. She was already doing this. I just want to say that right now. She is the director of Colorado Coaching as well as the owner of Mindset for Success. So, please help me welcome Zoilita Grant. It is so wonderful to have you on the show today, dear.
Zoilita Grant: Thank you so much. I love talking to writers.
Janine: I know. So many writers have a story to tell, and there are all these hiccups that happen along the way or little speed bumps. There are potholes. However, whatever metaphor you care to use– and one of the things I love about having you on the show is, in The Secret Life Of Dreams you talked about why their dreaming functionality is so important. So just go ahead and share with us a little bit about what was kind of the defining moment for you when you realized, “Wow. I need to write about this subject.”
Zoilita: So, my books for hypnosis practice nerds. I wrote twenty-four books in five years. And I wrote them in a very disciplined, every morning from five to seven I wrote. And at that time, I had a pretty large school where I certified hypnotherapist. So this book ‘The Secret Life Of Dreaming,’ I have been working on for 50 years. It is a book that over the course of time I have gained more and more insight into things, like the importance of dreaming. You know, dreams keep us whole. Dreams are a way that we are really truthful to ourselves. Dreams are our best option for divine guidance every night. Like, every night, we get a direct letter from God, or the source of all truths, through our dreams. And so, the ability to remember your dreams, understand your dreams, because the dreams are written in a different language, the language of symbols, and to use your dreams. It is something that I have a passion for, to bring to people. And so, when I wrote this book, ‘The Secret Life of Dreams,’ over the COVID quarantine, I drew up all of my notes for the last 50 years and put this interactive dream journal together, so that the book actually teaches you how to work with your dreams. It gives you opportunities to journal about your dreams.
Janine: I am grateful that there is so much good that came out of the quarantine and all that. And people are just now starting to see that in 2021. I am like, “I cannot wait to see all the books, and I am coming out of the pandemic,” because peeping finally had an opportunity to take time and do that. So one of the things I would love for you to share about is, because of your work with hypnotists, training and certifying them, that dreams really are important, and that some have a book kind of locked away within them. How can dreams help unlock some of their barriers to writing their story?
Zoilita: So, do you know the story of Robert Louis Stevenson?
Janine: Let us go ahead and hear it. Retell it to us.
Zoilita: So Robert Louis Stevenson was a writer that had to feed a large family by writing novels and short stories in England in the eighteen hundreds. And so he dreamed that he had little, I think he called them ‘brownies,’ who he could call to as he was going to sleep, and they would bring him dreams. He wrote ‘Treasure Island,’ chapter by chapter. Like, he would have a dream, and he would wake up the next morning, and he would write a chapter of the book.
Janine: That is crazy. Isn’t that wild? That is just wonderful. He also wrote ‘Kidnapped.’ He has a whole plethora of work, but one of the favorites, of course, is Treasure Island. That is just, you know, talk about your action-adventure storyline. It is fabulous. So yeah. So dreams are rather important. And you have talked to me a lot before, and we have discussed how dreams are really just doorways into the subconscious. So how do people really start accessing those doors and keeping them open for their own welfare? For their own benefit?
Zoilita: So the first thing you have to do is you have to come to believe that dreams are important.
Janine: [laughter] That is like the first step. Number one, this is important.
Zoilita: Yeah. The content of your dreams is not really nonsense, as how popular culture has made them, but they are important information. So once you start saying to yourself, “It is important that I remember my dreams,” you can begin to remember them.
Janine: And it is that popular culture that a lot of times gets in the way of people doing what is in their highest and best good. Because of the coaching that you do, I have many writers who have come to me and said, “Janine, I do not know if I really want to write this book now because I have to go through a lot of my old past garbage, and I do not know if I really want to go there.” And they do not understand how their story can inspire others. So, do you have any advice on how to help folks deal with the past, and at the same time, get it on the page to assist another?
Zoilita: You know, that is absolutely one of the best things that I like about hypnosis. Because when we use hypnosis, we can take emotionally-stimulating content and make it into historical data. So when the person can look back at their journey through life and see the different aspects of the dark night of the soul that they walk through to get to this place, they do it with detached awareness so that they can see and learn without having to feel the emotional impact.
Janine: And that is a great way of saying it, where you see yourself as a historian and you are just recording the data to help guide the adventures that are walking behind you on the same path. That is brilliant. So first, step one, we have got to make sure that we consider dreams important. You know we have a whole culture that sees them as flim-flam. They are not really of any value, but although that is starting to change. I have noticed in a lot of the movies and stuff that it is allowed now. You are allowed to let dreams kind of guide you. But how many people have you had in your life that said, “I just do not remember them,” you know? Any advice for that poor soul?
Zoilita: Absolutely. You know, I did a series of little, nice graphics that I post on Facebook that are tips to remember dreams. One of the tips to remember dreams is to go to bed early enough to have some energy when you go to sleep so that your sleep time is just not exhaustion. That you have some energy to put into the dream world and keep a tablet and a pen, or even better yet, my new Secret Life Of Dreams book right by your bed so that you can pick it up and write the first things that come to mind when you wake up.
Janine: And we have heard that advice a lot. I just want to throw in a bit of data here that they did a bunch of studies with sleep clinics, right? Sleep clinics. And they said that most Americans, anyway, are so sleep-deprived that when they come to the Sleep Clinic, they would sleep anywhere from 11 to 12 hours every night that they were there. Because they gave themselves “permission to sleep all the time they needed.” So before this, you know, do not just give it up right off the bat. It may take you a week of going to bed early and allowing yourself to catch up on that 11 to 12 hours of sleep. They said, after the Sleep Clinic that I was following, after three to five nights of going to bed early and getting that 11 hours, or however long it is for people who are emotionally and mentally exhausted, that that they leveled out, and then, they only needed the six to eight hours after that. But you have to get over that hump first. So do not just throw out what Zoilita is talking to you about off the bat because you may be so sleep-deprived you got to catch up.
Zoilita: Yes.
Janine: So I just wanted to throw that out there as a point, data point. So, okay. So we go to bed early so that we can actually have some time to follow through with the– You have a few other action points here that you wanted to cover about, ‘reviewing and processing your day before you go to sleep.’ What do you exactly mean by that?
Zoilita: So dreams come on different levels, and they range all the way from what we think of as ‘clearing house dreams.’ I just spend the whole night filing through the things of the day that I did not actually have time to process. Two, spiritual dreams where you either have prophetic insight about your life, or other people’s lives, or you have direct communication with however it is that you feel, see no God, or the source, and get direct inside. So there are all those levels. So if you do not want to waste your time on just clearing up stuff from the day, take a few minutes and think about your day. Think about your day as if you are going backward. You know, ‘here I was sitting at dinner and then I got home from work, and then I went for my workday,’ and then you go all the way back to when you just got up in the morning. And that clears the day from the subconscious mind and allows you to have more productive dreams.
Janine: Basically, it is like decluttering a drawer of all the excess stuff so that you actually have space to put new stuff in. So that you can receive whatever it is you need to receive. In this list you were kind enough to give me, we were talking about ‘tell yourself to remember your dreams.’ Is that just simple “Okay. I am going to remember my dreams tonight and pass out” or?
Zoilita: In my Secret Life Of Dreams kit, because it comes with that workbook, it comes with some beautiful mandalas to color that are from the book, and it also comes with an MP3 called ‘Dream Work’. Dream Work takes you into sleep, takes you into deep restorative sleep, and has words in it like “My dreams are clear, concise, and helpful. I remember my dreams. I understand my dreams.” So you are giving yourself if you do not have the advantage of having the MP3, those are the kinds of things you say to yourself.
Janine: Well, it is wonderful advice to give yourself. It is very high-quality advice, you know. This is important stuff. Let us make it happen. The thing that I really liked about the list that you have on ‘how to remember dreams’ is the fact that you then recommend, “Look. Not only keep your writing journals close by bedside but stay in bed an extra few minutes reviewing your dreams.” I do not think we are such a do-it-now type of society. Laying in bed, that is like a luxury only for Sunday morning. So, describe that a little bit more to us.
Zoilita: So, again, I think we are at a change in our society. You know, I think that the pandemic was a culture-changing event. I do not think it was the asteroids with the dinosaurs, but it comes almost in that category. It is an experience that is designed to shake us up and think about things. You know, I have a client that lives in a city in the East. She was telling me that before COVID, she commuted three hours a day, taking her kids to school, going to work, picking up her kids, and picking up takeout on the way home for dinner. Now she has an extra three hours of time in her life. She gets her work done. Her children are really well-organized around their schooling, so she is lucky in that kind of framework, and she is able to cook meals for her family. So we are seeing that maybe going back to how it was is not really what we want to do. We want to make some changes in how we live.
Janine: So this ‘laying in bed an extra few minutes to recall your dreams,’ what are some of the things that you recommend somebody do as they are laying in bed and they are giving themselves permission to lie there for just five minutes?
Zoilita: Breath. Breathe in a deep and restorative way. Begin from that place of calm, so you do not have to put your foot on the accelerator and pump adrenaline into your life. You live longer.
Janine: Yeah. You will live longer, and it is a lot more enjoyable way to wake up rather than throwing yourself into work immediately after your alarm goes off. Well, your third point was ‘how to understand your dreams.’ There is so much material out in this world about what this means, what that means, and I have always found that everybody kind of has their own lexicon of what their symbols mean for them. So how do you help your clients start learning what dreams mean?
Zoilita: What you said was really significant about how everyone has a personal symbol language. So dreams are in symbolic language, and symbolic language is more like Chinese than English. It is like each character has a picture inside of it. That you can never rationally say “this means this,” but you can feel what the meaning of that is. So water, water is a universal symbol for emotions. But if you are an Olympic swimmer and I nearly drowned as a child, when water appears in our dreams…
Janine: We are going to very different perspectives.
Zoilita: We get to have different experiences of what that is meaning. But your symbols are pretty consistent. So if you start following them, and paying attention, you know… I would like to tell briefly the story of my life dream and why my life dream became such a powerful thing for me. So, sometimes in my past life, I have been a little rash, and I decided when I was 21 years old that I was going to go on a vision quest. And I was going to fast in the desert, climb a mountain, and save a lot. So, I chose the desert of Northern Mexico which was a real desert with real scorpions and real snakes. Somewhere along the way, I realized that “I could really die here,” not just some kind of metaphysical experience. But I was wanting to have a vision, so I came to this place where I camped. And when I camped in this area, there were caves, and there were bats. Now, I have always had a little fear of the ‘vampire image,’ and I had been hiking in the hot sun with no food or water. Okay. I took my special rocks, my tarot cards, my astrological chart. I took no food or water. I took a canteen and iodine purification tablets and walked along a river. So I was going to camp there and the bats were coming out of the cave, and I was like, “Oh my gosh. Are they really bats? Am I hallucinating? Are they vampires?” So I was not going to go to sleep, but then I fell asleep. And I dreamed that I was flying through the air and I came to the castle of the vampire. The vampire came out of the castle and came towards me. I pretended I did not see it, and it grabbed me and tore me apart. Then I was not going to go to sleep. I put water on my face from the little river, but I fell asleep again, and I had the same dream. This time when the vampire came, I ran away, but it caught me and tore me apart. So then, I fell asleep again, and I had the third dream. And this time when the vampire came towards me, I turned, I face the vampire, I raised my hands up into the heavens, the sun came up, the light hit the silver bracelet that I had, it went in the eye of the vampire, blew up the vampire, and I fell into another dream. And in the dream I fell into, it was like people forming geometric designs, like that six-pointed star that I use in my logo, that was the symbol. I was standing in this circle, and a ship, a pirate ship with eight masts and sails, was floating in the clouds. A rainbow came out of the ship, went down into this circle, and a voice said, “This dream is the meaning of your life. Follow the dream.” So for the next 27 years, every three or four months, I dreamed about that ship. When I was in my 30s I learned to climb the rainbow and get into the ship. When I was in my 40s, I wandered from room to room and could not find the right room. And then I found the right room, and I could not get into it. And then finally, I got into the room and on the table was this little wooden box. Inside of the box was a long skeletal key, you know, an old-fashioned key. And the same voice that I had heard 27 years earlier said, “This is the master key. Help turn it for humanity.” And then, the dream ended, that was like in the 1980s, but now every time I come to a place in my life where I am going to have to make a choice, that is a major choice, I have the dream of the ship. And I see this ship in a circle, and it is just floating in the sky, and it tells me, “This is an important decision.”
Janine: This is a milestone in your journey. This is a marker a guidepost. You know, everybody has all these different metaphors. Shamans and Mystics from all different cultures talk about these metaphors in different ways, but that is a beautiful metaphor to have. So you have these major choices, these major life events that are hallmarked by this beautiful ship that sits in the sky.
Zoilita: Yeah. With gold and silver light.
[laughter]
Janine:: That is just fun. That is just fun being able to fly around in that.
Zoilita: Yeah.
Janine: Peter Pan has nothing on you.
Zoilita: I told this dream once to a professor when I went back to college, and the professor said to me, “Do you think it was an alien abduction?” [laughter] Then I was like, “That never entered my head.”
Janine: There are so many different paradigms running around with over 7 billion people on this planet that I am always fascinated with what other people bring into my storytelling. You know, whatever my journey is, whatever story I am I am working on, it is always amazing to me how somebody will take it and run with it in a direction where I was like, “Well, that was not really what I was trying to write about, but that is also a story I may need to include in the chapter.” [laughter]
Zoilita: Yeah.
Janine: Thank you very much, by the way, for sharing your dream with us, your recurring dream, and sharing with us how you use it. Because that leads us right into the fourth point, which was, ‘Yes. Okay. So I learned how to classify dreams as important in my world, and I write them down. And I learned how to understand my dreams through these symbols that we have. But then, how do I go about using these dreams?’ And you very quickly stated to us that there are spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical uses for dreams. So do you want to elaborate a little bit more on that?
Zoilita: Yes. So many inventions have come from dreams. The man that invented the sewing machine– he spent so many years trying to figure out how to make a sewing machine work and then he had a dream where he saw natives with spears that had holes in them that had a thread going through them, and they were punching through the fabric. And that gave him the creative idea about how to have that. Edison dreamed about the light bulb for years and years, and years, like, he knew from his inner being that the lightbulb was possible. He had over a thousand, what society might call ‘failures,’ in inventing the light bulb because he kept trying different kinds of substances inside to carry the content of electricity. In fact, when he did invent the light bulb and the New York Times interviewed him, they said, “Well, did you not feel like a failure? You had over a thousand tries,” and he said, “No. It was a process that took a thousand steps.”
Janine: Exactly. It was a process. Since I am a geeky scientist and I was in Biochemistry, we have stories upon stories in the 1800s of where experiments were done, or models were created that we later had technology that proved correct based on these dreams. You would look in the notebooks of some of these early scientists, and you would see in their notebooks how they are constantly drawing the images from dreams. And that is how they learned the fundamental building blocks of chemistry. So yeah, I get you on that whole dream thing.
Zoilita: Yeah.
Janine: It is rather important.
Zoilita: So, dreams can be used to enhance creativity. Okay? Dreams can be used to solve problems. Okay. You say to yourself before you go to sleep, “Here is this problem. I ask my dreams to be clear, concise, and helpful, and to help me see the answer to the problem,” and people would dream about it.
Janine: The only other person that I can recall having read about, that is as active a dreamer as you are and as you encourage others to be, was Shirley MacLaine, where she would talk about when she got stuck in any aspect of her life, she would go take a nap, and people are like, “What are you doing? We are about ready to go on and do XYZ,” and she is like, “I got to go sleep.” Because she did not have an understanding of meditation, as some people use nowadays, she would go take a nap. Sometimes it is only five to seven minutes, but it would be long enough for her to solve whatever it was that was sticking a point in her head. And in her biography, she talks about that. It is not really a process for her. It was just that she knew she had to go to sleep. So yeah, like you, very active, very concise, very clear dreams. So it takes a little bit of practice, would you say. What is your experience with people about how long it takes some folks to kind of get their groove on for this sort of understanding?
Zoilita: First of all, everyone dreams. Okay? Even if you do not think you dream, you dream. If you did not dream, you would be having hallucinatory experiences in daylight. Okay? You would be literally seeing…
Janine: Fish swimming through walls. Oh, yeah. It is crazy. The stories they have done with sleep deprivation is pretty awesome.
Zoilita: Yeah. So, you agree. So the first step is to remember them. The second step is to understand them, and the third step is to come to use them. So this is an easy process that you can learn to do. And when you learn to do it, it opens another dimension of your life. Problem-solving, enhancing, sometimes just having wonderful ventures. Wonderful adventures that take you out of the stress of the everyday world. Sometimes it comes like really strong guidance. You know, I did not want to move to Colorado, although I totally, completely love it. But I had a very convenient life in California. I had wonderful friends, I was the president of a wonderful Business and Professional Women’s Group. Everything in my life was really working. I did not want to move. I had four teenagers. Who can move with four teenagers? Other than perhaps you.
Janine: Right. That was what we have in common. We both moved to Colorado with four teenagers. Exactly. I understand, hon.
Zoilita: So I kept getting these nudges in my meditation. “Move to Colorado. Move to Colorado.” Then I had a dream. Now I am probably more Buddhist than Christian, but I have had Christian experiences in the background. I dreamed that the Archangel Michael and the Archangel Gabriel showed up, and Gabriel blew his horn. Now I have just enough of that Christian philosophy to know that if Gabriel blows his horn, you better pay attention. So when Gabriel blows, the Archangel Michael unfurled one of these big banners like you see in old churches, and it said, “Move to the Rocky Mountains now.”
[laughter]
Janine: So, in case you had trouble with some of the symbolism, they literally spelled it out for you and blew the horn in your ear just to make sure you were aware enough that you would remember this upon waking. I am sorry. That is exactly the way my dreams operate. It is because they know that Janine can be a bit stubborn, so we are going to literally make this so you cannot deny what we are talking about.
Zoilita: Absolutely. It definitely got my attention. I woke up my poor husband, and I said, “We are moving to Colorado,” and he said, “We cannot move to Colorado. We have four teenagers.” And I said, “Well, we are going to Colorado anyway.”
Janine: They can choose to come or not, but that is what is happening. Zoilita, as always, it is such a delight and a pleasure to speak with you. So, say somebody wants to not only look up your MP3s but also get to know you a little bit better and get your book. You had a couple of websites, and you also have a Facebook group. So do you mind telling us a little bit about that?
Zoilita: So I have only one important website, and it is www.mindset-for-success.org, and my Facebook group is called the Mindset for Success Community. There are no politics in it.
Janine: [laughter] Right. It is a safe haven. That is what I like about your group. It is a safe haven. So, if you want to learn more about Zoilita Grant, I highly recommend you visit our website, mindset-for-success.org, definitely pop in and ask to be invited into her Facebook group, ‘Mindset for Success Community.’ It is a very comfortable and safe space to kind of hang out. Anything else you want to share with us before we close out this show?
Zoilita: So this is my slogan in life, and I want to share it all with you. “Change your mind, change your life. Create by design, not by default.”
Janine: Thank you so much, my dear listeners. This is Zoilita Grant and Janine Bolon, signing off from The Writers Hour Creative Conversations. And I would like you to make sure that you stand firmly, feet planted firmly on the ground, but do not forget to keep reaching for those stars. Your creativity is through your intuition and your dreaming. And if you need a little bit of inspiration, I highly recommend you reach out to Zoilita or buy her book, ‘The Secret Life of Dreaming.’ That will give you what you need to move on to the next step. So, have a great day. We will chat with you in the next episode.
[END]