The Dream & Innovation Lab™

Where the deeper mind meets the leading edge.

For founders, innovators, executives, and creatives.

Image becomes vision.
Vision becomes form.

What if the “next big thing” is already within you?

There is a layer of intelligence beneath your analytical mind that most leaders never reach. An inner world that visionaries, innovators, Einstein, and Jung knew how to access. A well of creativity, invention, and insight.

It speaks in images. In dreams. In the sudden knowing that arrives before words. The Dream & Innovation Lab™ is where you learn to access it and make it work for you.

Most leaders never develop this deeper channel. Not because it isn’t there. Because no one taught them how.

A photo of Leslie Miranda in her California Office wearing a dark gray skirt suit and a light purple blouse. Behind her are framed diplomas and certifications.

WHAT THE LAB IS

It is not traditional coaching. It is not psychotherapy. It is something completely new.

The Lab merges dreamwork, active imagination, and applied neuroscience. The result is an integrative and imaginal methodology designed for personal and professional transformation, innovative and creative insight and invention, breakthrough thinking, and vision made actionable.

The Dream & Innovation Lab™ is:

a structured minimum 12 week engagement for executives, founders, and high performers.
a proprietary methodology combining applied neuroscience, Jungian depth psychology, dreamwork, art expression, and active imagination.
designed to access the level of insight your analytical mind cannot generate alone.

WHO THE LAB IS FOR

The Dream & Innovation Lab™ is for creators, leaders, or builders who know there is more available to them than ordinary thinking has been able to reach.

Visionary Founders and executives who need breakthrough thinking…not just strategy.
Leaders who have hit the limits of analytical problem-solving…and sense the answer lives somewhere deeper.
Professionals in the midst of a vital project who need to cohere existing knowledge into something new and original.
High-achievers who have been circling the same problem and need a genuinely different way in.
Creatives who want to move beyond the familiar…and access something genuinely new.
Scientists, researchers, and innovators who sense they are on the verge of something significant - and need to access the layer of mind where discovery actually begins.
If you’ve ever had your clearest idea in the shower, in a dream, or woken in the night with a solution you couldn’t have reasoned your way to - you already know this layer exists. The Lab teaches you to access it on purpose.

WHAT HAPPENS INSIDE

This is a 12-week engagement. One 60-90 minute session per week.

Each session moves toward a specific kind of inner encounter - working with your own dreams, images, and symbolic material as live intelligence about the challenge or decision in front of you.

This is not abstract. Every session is in direct service of something real you are building, solving, or deciding.

You will work through dreamwork, active imagination, imagery, somatic awareness, and expressive arts. Applied depth psychology and neuroscience-informed practice, brought directly to your most important work, growth, and life.

Between sessions, you receive consultation via text and email to assist with integration, problem solving , and to support your vision into being. Many participants find that the process deepens self-awareness, and builds emotional resilience.

At the end of 12 weeks, we evaluate whether another series will best serve you.

**What if your greatest asset isn’t expertise, but imagination?**

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” —Albert Einstein

Einstein didn't solve his greatest problems through calculation alone. He imagined riding alongside a beam of light, and from that interior journey, the theory of relativity emerged.

Paul McCartney heard the melody to Yesterday in a dream.

Larry Page conceived of Google the same way.

Otto Loewi dreamed of an experiment that demonstrated chemical transmission between nerves – a discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize.

The unconscious has been offering innovation all along. Most of us were never taught how to listen.

The Dream & Innovation Lab™ creates the conditions to change that.

What Emerges

What emerges will be from a layer of intelligence you may not have known you could consciously access.

Here, you:

solve your specific problems with metaphor.
break through personal plateaus with intuition.
generate innovative models for growth in your career from a place most leaders never reach.
Access repeatable tools to keep doing it long after our work together ends.

This is innovative thinking grounded in neuroscience. And it works.

WHAT YOU WALK AWAY WITH

Innovative approaches to specific challenges you bring - the kind that don’t emerge through ordinary analytical thinking.
A direct relationship with your own unconscious as a living source of innovation.
The ability to problem solve by working with the repeatable tools of dreams, images, and symbolic material
A practice that deepens over time. The more you use it, the more it yields.

THE POWER OF NEUROSCIENCE FOR BETTER BUSINESS SKILLS

Modern organizations require innovation, yet the cognitive state most associated with creative insight is also the one most suppressed by high-pressure work environments.

Research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology identifies two distinct thinking modes:

The first is task-focused: analytical, goal-directed, efficient at execution. It is the mode most leaders operate in by default.
The second is exploratory: associative, curious, open to novel connections. This is where creative insight tends to emerge.

Under constant pressure, deadlines, and stimulation, the exploratory mode gets crowded out. The analytical mind stays dominant. And the thinking needed for genuine innovation becomes harder to access.

The Dream & Innovation Lab™ creates structured conditions for shifting from task-focused thinking into exploratory thinking. It’s deliberate, skillful, and in service of your most important creative work.

These images emerged:

A figure reaching toward a star. Arms open. Oriented toward something she couldn’t yet name.

Another image. Two hands finding each other.

In active imagination, a very specific image: a woman in a coffin. Trapped. She has to punch her way out. She punches her hand through the wood. And grasping her hand on the other side is the goddess of the North Star. Luminous.

It’s like the faith to keep going granted the goddess to come down.

HOW THE LAB CAME TO BE

My Background

Grounded in symbolism & science.

My father is a nuclear physicist. From him I learned that science, approached with awe, is also mysticism. My mother is an English professor. From her I learned to read symbols.
My journey to Depth Psychology

The power of the unconscious mind.

I earned a master's degree in applied psychology at the University of Santa Monica, then a master's degree in counseling psychology with a depth psychology emphasis at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
My thesis at Pacifica explored dreams, intuition, and the imaginal in psychology. I became fluent in the language of the unconscious, the way it speaks in symbol, image, and metaphor.
17 Years Ago

I began an experiment.

As a depth psychotherapist trained in Jungian principles, I knew that what lives in the unconscious holds a power our modern world largely ignores. Dreams and active imagination were almost never considered professional tools. Yet I had seen it firsthand: the unconscious mind contains unrealized creative potential.
The unconscious is not merely a repository of wounds. It may also be a source of innovation.
Dreams, active imagination, and symbolic processes may represent an underdeveloped frontier of human creativity, innovation, and self-understanding.
I began weaving methods of accessing the unconscious directly into my clinical work. The more my clients engaged with this material, the more I witnessed tangible shifts — in their ability to access new solutions, in their capacity to think originally under pressure, and in the innovative work that followed.
Then AI emerged

And I went further.

I created what I now call the Gallery of Dreams — a year-long experiment in which I recorded my own dream imagery into AI to render it visually. What I discovered changed the way I understood the work: it is not only the content of a dream that carries the potency. It is the image.
I began to recognize that these images could be engaged directly, not just when asleep, but when awake, through what Jung called active imagination. And that we can invite spontaneous images to arise. A call and response between the conscious and unconscious mind.
I then explored expressive arts

Drawing, painting, and making the active imagination visible and embodied

What had seemed peripheral turned out to be central. I later came to understand that the artistic expression activated during drawing and painting was stimulating the brain’s default mode network, associated with spontaneous thinking and creativity.
Using a combination of these techniques, my clients reported profound shifts. The results were among the most remarkable I had seen in my clinical work.
What surprised me most was how quickly people could access this material — often within minutes, using the specific tools and questions I developed to guide this process.
Jung spent years in private dialogue with his own unconscious, recording the images and figures that emerged. The result was The Red Book, one man’s extraordinary record of interior inquiry.
As remarkable as this work is, what I discovered is that this same capacity is available to all of us.
Next, I enrolled in Wharton Executive Education

Understanding the Brain: Using Neuroscience to Deliver Better Business Results.
I began to wonder whether these tools — dreamwork, active imagination, expressive arts — could be used not just for personal healing, but with a practical purpose. Could they be applied directly to innovation and business outcomes?
For my final project, I brought everything together — depth psychology, dreamwork, imaginal work, expressive arts, and AI-generated imagery — and made the case, supported by research, that these are neuroscientific tools that shift the mind from task-focused thinking into the exploratory mode where genuine innovation lives.
My evaluator affirmed that the methods provided a framework for innovative thinking and described the idea as brilliant. Until this point, these methods had lived entirely between me and my clients, and in psychotherapeutic or scholarly enclaves. The encouragement I received from a neuroscience program at one of the world’s top business schools gave me the courage to step forward and make this work visible.
This does not represent an official endorsement from Wharton or the University of Pennsylvania.

A photo of Leslie Miranda, sitting outside where trees and tufts of grass are visible. She has dark blonde hair, and is wearing a pink floral dress.

One of the challenges I see facing leaders is that when under stress innovative thinking is needed the most.

However, we might not be able to access it because the brain is in a highly focused state instead of a creative one.

Active imagination is a way of accessing what the rational mind cannot reach on its own. A way to generate innovation from the inside out.

While many participants come to the Lab seeking solutions to professional challenges, they often discover deeper self-understanding, expanded creative capacity, greater resilience, and a more intentional relationship with the inner sources of insight, intuition, meaning, and growth.

It’s worked with a range of professional clients: CEOs, leaders, and creatives who are curious about the benefits of depth psychology principles for innovation.

But sweeter still than laughter and greater than longing came to me. It was the boundless in you. —Kahlil Gibran