Amy Perez: Can Dreams Help You Make Better Decisions?

Entrepreneurs love data.

Revenue. Conversion. Retention. Runway. Customer acquisition cost. Pipeline. Forecasts.

When something important must be decided, the instinct is often to gather more information until the correct answer becomes obvious.

Except it rarely does.

At some point, every consequential decision contains uncertainty. You can build another spreadsheet, commission another analysis, or ask another adviser, but eventually you encounter information that cannot be reduced to a dashboard.

And sometimes the information you are missing may already be inside you.

Amy Perez believes dreams can offer access to that overlooked layer—not as prophecy and not as instructions, but as another source of information.

“Your subconscious can be another source of information,” she says. “The goal is learning how to listen to it without letting it make the decision for you.”

That distinction may be the most useful place to begin.

What Happens When Success Looks Right but Feels Wrong?

Perez spent years working in high-stakes government environments, including responsibility connected with a digital system that distributed more than $10 billion in pandemic aid.

By conventional measures, she was succeeding.

Her responsibilities were growing. Her career had status and purpose. She was performing.

Internally, however, something was different. “I was exhausted,” she recalls. “While my life looked good on paper, I was slowly dying on the inside.” That mismatch will be familiar to many founders and executives.

High performers can become exceptionally skilled at overriding signals that interfere with the plan. Exhaustion becomes commitment. Anxiety becomes responsibility. Discomfort becomes the price of ambition.

Perez describes doing exactly that: rationalizing, pushing through, staying busy and insisting everything was fine.

Then came a vivid dream.

She dreamed she was being held hostage at work. A gunman shot her. She fought back and eventually shot him. When she looked down, however, where his head should have been was her work phone—shattered by a bullet and somehow still functioning.

Perez did not treat the dream as a supernatural command.

She treated it as information she could no longer comfortably ignore.

Soon afterward, she quit.

She says the physical sense of relief was immediate. Later, she and her husband left their careers and spent a year traveling before eventually building MyDream, an AI-assisted dream interpretation platform.

The broader lesson is not “quit your job because you dreamed about it.”

It is more uncomfortable:

What information are you repeatedly suppressing because it conflicts with the life you have already built?

Are Dreams Really Processing Emotion?

There is a useful boundary between what neuroscience establishes and what dream interpretation proposes.

Research does support an important role for sleep in emotional processing and emotional memory. Reviews of the scientific literature describe sleep as participating in emotional memory formation and regulation, with REM sleep appearing particularly relevant to some forms of emotional processing.

Research specifically examining dreaming also points to connections between dream experience, emotional memory and emotional processing, while emphasizing that the mechanisms and functional role of dreaming remain incompletely understood.

That is very different from claiming that a snake, tornado or pregnancy has one scientifically established meaning.

Perez herself rejects that one-size-fits-all model.

She says common symbolic associations can provide possibilities, but personal context matters. A snake might produce fear in one person and affection in someone who grew up with one as a pet. Her platform therefore asks users to validate emotions and meanings rather than simply accepting an automated interpretation.

That turns dream interpretation from decoding into inquiry.

Instead of asking:

What does this symbol mean?

A better question may be:

What does this symbol mean to me, in the context of what is happening in my life right now?

The Subconscious Should Be an Input, Not the CEO

That distinction becomes particularly important for entrepreneurs.

Business culture celebrates rationality, but important decisions rarely arrive with complete information.

Which employee should you trust?

Is the partnership wrong even though the economics look attractive?

Are you persisting because the strategy remains sound—or because admitting failure threatens your identity?

Should you accept an opportunity that looks extraordinary on paper but produces an unexplained internal resistance?

Perez argues that entrepreneurs already combine quantitative information with intuition; dream reflection can simply expose another layer of that process.

But there is an important safeguard.

A dream should not become evidence that something objectively is true.

It can instead reveal that some part of you is afraid, conflicted, excited, resentful, overwhelmed or unconvinced. Those are different claims.

The first outsources reality to interpretation. The second creates new questions worth investigating. For a leader, that may be surprisingly practical.

If you repeatedly dream about losing control before an acquisition, that does not prove the acquisition is wrong. It may tell you that control is psychologically important to you. Now there is something useful to examine.

Can AI Interpret Something This Personal?

Artificial intelligence introduces another complication.

Dreams can contain intensely private material: relationships, fears, grief, sexuality, work conflicts, aspirations and experiences someone may never have discussed openly.

Perez therefore sees dream interpretation as a test case for a different philosophy of consumer technology.

“I don't want to build technology that gets people to spend more time on their phones,” she says. “I want to build technology that helps them understand themselves and then put the phone down.”

Her principle extends beyond dream apps.

Much of digital product design measures success through engagement. More minutes, more clicks and more interactions usually indicate a healthier product.

Perez proposes almost the inverse: technology succeeds when it helps someone understand something important and return to their life.

That philosophy also requires restraint from AI itself.

Generative AI can produce an authoritative-sounding explanation even where uncertainty is high. Perez therefore emphasizes presenting interpretations as possibilities rather than truth and keeping human judgment in control.

That approach aligns with broader responsible-AI principles. NIST's AI Risk Management Framework emphasizes characteristics including reliability, transparency, privacy, explainability and accountability, while its generative-AI guidance highlights the importance of human oversight and risk management throughout AI use.

The more intimate the data, the more important that humility becomes.

How Can You Start Working With Your Dreams?

Perez suggests something remarkably low-tech.

Before going to sleep, decide that you want to remember your dreams. When you wake up, capture whatever remains. Do not wait for a complete narrative. Record a sentence. A scene. An emotion. Even one word.

Over time, look for recurrence.

Perez describes noticing that certain dream images repeatedly appeared during particular kinds of change in her own life. For her, the value came less from interpreting an isolated dream than from identifying patterns across many dreams.

The entrepreneurial equivalent is familiar.

One data point may be noise.

A repeated signal deserves attention.

That does not mean obeying it. It means investigating it.

Better Decisions May Require More Than More Data

There is an appealing paradox here.

Entrepreneurs have access to more external information than any previous generation. AI can summarize markets, analyze customers, model scenarios and generate recommendations almost instantly.

Yet no system has direct access to the full internal experience of the person making the decision.

Fear.

Identity.

Ambivalence.

Desire.

Exhaustion.

The feeling you keep explaining away.

Dreams may not provide answers to those questions. The scientific evidence does not justify treating them as an oracle.

But they may occasionally reveal the questions your waking mind has become skilled at avoiding.

For one week, try a simple experiment. Keep something beside your bed and record whatever you remember upon waking. Do not ask, “What prediction is this making?”

Ask instead:

What might my mind be trying to get me to notice?

Then bring that information back into daylight—where evidence, experience, conversation and conscious judgment still get the final vote.

That may be the most responsible way to listen to the subconscious: not by giving it authority, but by finally giving it a seat at the table.

Amy Perez explored these ideas on 21st Century Entrepreneurship, including the personal experience that changed her career, the development of MyDream, and her approach to combining AI with human judgment.