A Canadian woman in her early 20s dreamed of drowning, gripped by the extreme terror of being unable to escape or get help.
"I was trapped inside a transparent glass box, caught in a whirlpool in the river. I reached out for help, but no one was there."
The nightmare was a replay of something she had actually lived through. Before she had the dream, she had come face to face with death. The first time was when she was born prematurely and hovered on the threshold between life and death. "I was born two months early, weighing only 1.4 kilograms," she says. "At the time, no one expected me to survive. I was confined to an incubator for two months. There was none of the physical holding and comfort a newborn needs in order to grow, because germs were considered the greatest threat to survival. Until I was discharged, the beginning of my life was marked by minimal physical contact and profound solitude." That experience was likely inscribed in her body.
The second crisis came when she was 17. "Caught up in the reckless confidence peculiar to adolescence, I tried to jump into a mountain river fed by a glacier, was swept away by the powerful current and sank deep under the water." She barely escaped with her life.
After that day, she began having terrible nightmares. That experience set her on the path to becoming a clinical therapist. To build her skills as a counselor, she trained under a Jungian analyst. One day, as is commonly recommended in Jungian psychotherapy, she drew the images from her dream and spent time directly experiencing the intense emotions the dream had stirred up.
She recalls: "In one unforgettable session, we re-enacted the dream. When I asked for help, he took my hand firmly and met me there. His touch, reaching across the years, allowed the infant part of me to feel his clear, solid contact. It was so completely unexpected that a shiver ran through my entire body. The healing that came through this dream work was perhaps the most profound experience I have had in any therapy. The dream led me into a far deeper and more meaningful realm, and became a catalyst for inner change that is difficult to put into words."
The dreamer is Dr. Leslie Ellis. She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and has served as an adjunct professor at Adler University and as president of The International Focusing Institute (TIFI). She has built a career as a psychotherapist and educator, running a private clinic in Vancouver, Canada, for more than 25 years. She is a pioneer of experiential, body-centered approaches to working with trauma and nightmares. "In dream therapy, if the body does not respond, there is a chance the work will remain merely verbal," she says.
In 2025, Ellis published a revised edition of "A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy: Implementing Simple and Effective Dreamwork." The book distills the essence of body-centered dream work, integrating Carl Jung's active imagination, Fritz Perls' Gestalt therapy and Eugene Gendlin's Focusing technique. Together with Dr. Lee Yoon-min and Dr. Lee Deok-hee, I took part in co-translating the book, firmly convinced that it would serve as a practical guide for psychotherapy through dreams.
The book's main content and features can be summed up in three points. First, it moves beyond dream interpretation analyzed with the head and presents dream work experienced through the body. This overcomes the limits of earlier dream therapy, which stopped at intellectual interpretation, and proposes "embodied experiential dreamwork," in which insight comes from feeling again, in the body, the sensations and emotions present at the time of the dream. It also lays out a clear step-by-step process so that psychotherapists can apply it immediately in practice.
Second, it provides strong clinical grounding for treating trauma and nightmares. The revised edition adds two new chapters: one on how nightmares affect physical and mental health, and another on techniques for easing nightmares in clients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Third, it addresses the convergence of dream therapy with technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. By covering the use of AI to recreate dream imagery, the construction of immersive dream environments through VR, and the effects and future prospects of such scientific and technological advances for dream research and treatment, the book broadens the horizons of dream therapy.
Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard University professor and president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, wrote in her endorsement: "This book is the perfect guide for therapists who want to introduce dream analysis, or dream work, into their counseling practice. Author Leslie Ellis summarizes the major contemporary approaches to dreams in a way that is both scholarly and engaging, and clearly identifies the core therapeutic elements running through them. She also walks readers through absorbing real clinical cases so that practitioners can get a concrete sense of how to begin dream therapy in actual sessions."
