Many believe that dreaming begins during sleep and ends as we wake, as though consciousness draws a clear line between the day-world and the night. Cross the border into sleep and the strange country of dreams opens up; cross back at dawn and the gate swings shut behind us. In fact, there is more of a continuum between dreaming and waking consciousness. After spending years working closely with dreams, I have come to know that dreaming was never confined to the night.

I have long thought of dreaming as a river, an undercurrent that runs beneath our waking lives, available to dip into at any hour. You do not have to be asleep to feel its pull. It moves below the surface of an ordinary day, surfacing in a daydream, or a series of fleeting images that arrive seemingly from nowhere. If we choose to follow these imaginal vignettes, they can add novelty and creativity to our thoughts, shift our mood, and even change the tenor of the whole day. Now a group of researchers in Paris has gone looking for these shifting states of consciousness with electrodes and statistics, and they have found it.

What the brain does when no one is watching

The study, published this spring in Cell Reports by Nicolas Decat and colleagues in Delphine Oudiette’s lab at the Paris Brain Institute, set out to test the assumption that the bizarre, fluid, fantastical quality of dreaming only happens during sleep. They invited ninety-two people to recline with their eyes closed during two daytime rest periods, recorded their brain activity with EEG, and interrupted them again and again to ask a simple question: what just crossed your mind? Borrowing a trick from Thomas Edison, they had some participants hold a small object that would drop and rouse them at the very edge of sleep, catching the mind in the act of slipping under.

Each reported experience was rated along four dimensions: how bizarre it was, how fluid, how spontaneous, and how awake the person felt. When the researchers clustered hundreds of these reports, four distinct mental states emerged, which they called fleeting, alert, deliberate, and bizarre. Each of these four dimensions maps onto something we already recognize. Two are the ordinary traffic of a wandering mind: a fleeting state of fragmentary, snapshot-like images, and an alert state of fluid daydreaming still loosely tethered to the room. A third was openly deliberate, the goal-directed thinking we do on purpose, and it turned out to be the most common of the four.

The last is the bizarre state, fluid and strange and the most dream-like. It is also the rarest of the states and the one we typically assume is the sole province of sleep. What sets it apart is not only how it feels but how it looks on the EEG, with the frontal, executive grip loosening while the visual areas at the back of the brain stay lit, the very conditions under which the mind generates its own imagery. When the researchers checked these states against the sleep stages, they made the surprising finding that all four appeared across full wakefulness, light sleep, and deeper sleep alike. Dream states were experienced consistently by people who were, by every measure, wide awake. In other words, the waking brain and the sleeping brain can produce the very same kinds of experiences in roughly equal measure.

An old idea, newly confirmed

This finding did not surprise me at all. The dreamworkers I most admire have been saying this for a long time, in their own language, without the EEG. Arnold Mindell built his practice of process work on the conviction that dreaming is a form of consciousness available to us all the time, and in many ways more real than ordinary reality. He suggested that we tend to reach for techniques of association to make sense of dream images only because we have dissociated from our dreaming in the first place.

Mindell has a lovely word for the way the dream surfaces in daylight. He called them flirts, those flickering nonverbal sensations, the moods and hunches and quick tugs of attention that we usually dismiss as noise. A glint of light catches your eye before you know why. A feeling rises in the body that does not match the meeting you are sitting in. These are not interruptions of waking life. They are the river of dreaming showing itself, the same intelligence that runs riot at night, and visits intermittently at the edges of the day.

What the Paris study offers is a kind of permission, an empirical blessing that can authoritatively state that the dream is not just the province of sleep. It is a state the mind can enter at any time, at will or spontaneously. For those of us who have worked with waking dream states, it is a confirmation of what we have been saying all along.

Why this matters in the consulting room

This finding confirms the validity of working with waking dream states. Dreaming is a living state we can re-enter deliberately to engage with our dreams, learn from them, and experience some resolution to the puzzles or problems dreams often present to us in their creative and immersive fashion. This is the driving force beneath the embodied dreamwork I practice and teach.

When I work with a dream, rather than puzzling with the dreamer over what it might mean, I typically ask the dreamer to descend back into it. I ask them to re-tell the dream in the present tense, to feel into its landscape in their body as though it were happening now. In my book I describe a dream session with a woman terrified by a recurring figure from her past who had returned to her town. The man had been abusive to her and, in the dream, he shows up at her workplace to shoot her… 16 times! Together we looked for places of safety and support in the dream and I invited her to embody these. At one point I asked her to become the man she feared, and she felt how hollow and sick he was; then the sense of threat he brought dissipated. Afterward she said, “I’m not holding the charge anymore,” and she could found she could walk into work without the familiar dread waiting at the threshold.

That shift can be described by the process of memory reconsolidation, the discovery that memories are revised when we open them up and also are met with an experience that contradicts them. In neuroscience, this is called a prediction error. What truly surprises us changes us. Dreams, with their wide-open, anything-is-possible quality, are tailor-made to deliver that surprise. They are often laced with contradictory images that have the potential to overturn long-held beliefs about the world… but only if we enter these feelings and images fully enough to truly experience the contradiction that leads to something new.

What is felt, changes

Eugene Gendlin, whose focusing approach is the foundation of my own dreamwork methods, said it like this: what is felt, changes. What is split off and not felt stays frozen, repeating itself in our symptoms, our patterns and our nightmares. The Paris study lends weight to this wisdom. It confirms that the dreaming state is genuinely available to us in waking life, and therapy using waking dream states is not just constructed fantasy, but a true experience of the flow and wisdom of dreaming.

This is also why I treat nightmares as their own urgent concern rather than mere symptoms of something else. In my book’s nightmare relief chapter I describe how a trauma dream stays stuck precisely because it never delivers the surprise that brings change. The car is always about to crash; the dreamer wakes believing they did not survive. The belief system is frozen in that instant. When we re-enter the dream from a place of felt safety and let it move somewhere new, the body registers a different ending as more real than the old one. Then the frozen memory thaws and starts to move. We are doing, deliberately and while awake, what dreaming often does (or attempts) on its own.

Dipping into the river

If dreaming while awake intrigues you, you might begin noticing this for yourself. The next time an immersive daydream sequence arrives unbidden, or an image flickers at the edge of your attention, try pausing instead of brushing it aside. Stay with it, and ask, gently, what it wants you to notice. That is a flirt. That is the river of dreaming, pulling you in. Another option is to initiate a waking dream process deliberately by taking the time to re-enter a dream that is still alive in you. Don’t try to figure it out intellectually; instead allow yourself to re-experience it with your full waking consciousness. Ideally, you might have a listener to hold the space and allow you to drift more freely. Or you can journal about the experience, so you capture it for later reflection. This is not a waste of your time, but an opening into new understandings that dreams so often bring.

The Paris researchers measured something that experiential dreamworkers have long trusted: that the barrier between waking and dreaming is far more porous than you may think. We are not visitors to the dream world who arrive at night and leave at dawn. We are always dreaming. The current is there beneath the most ordinary Tuesday, inviting us to dip our attention into it and potentially experience a profound shift in our way of seeing the world.

These ideas are drawn from my book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, second edition), where the dreams and clinical examples mentioned here are explored in full. The study discussed is Decat et al. (2026), “Dream-like mental states can occur during wakefulness,” Cell Reports 45, 117237.

By Leslie Ellis

For more than two years I worked with a small international team of researchers on a deceptively simple problem: how to measure the depth of a person’s immediate experience as they speak. That depth turns out to be one of the better predictors we have of whether psychotherapy will actually help someone. The instrument that has measured it for decades is intricate and unwieldy, so we set out to build a leaner version, one a clinician or a researcher could hold in mind during an actual session. The new scale is finished now and headed for publication, and in the final stages of refining it I was struck again by this: How much new understanding opens up the moment we stop being sure.

The lowest rung is certainty

The scale grew out of a question asked at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s, by Eugene Gendlin and his colleagues Marjorie Klein, Philippa Mathieu and Donald Kiesler. Why do some therapy clients change while others, in for the same length of time and making the same apparent effort, do not? Their answer was disarmingly concrete. The difference shows up in how a person speaks, so that clients who change are, quite literally, speaking from a different place than those who stay the same. You might find what predicted success surprising: successful clients speak in halting, uncertain phrases that often change as they check back with something internally sensed, a direct and fluid lived experience.

Our updated version (EXP-II) enables us to sort any spoken statement into one of four levels. At the first and lowest level, a person speaks with a certainty that precludes questioning. Events and feelings are reported as settled facts. “He is tense all the time.” “What she said made me angry.” There is no room to maneuver in such sentences, nothing the speaker is turning over or wondering about, because the world has already been named and the naming has closed it.

The smallest, most consequential shift

The second level is a small move with large consequences: the turn from knowing to not-knowing. “I wonder where my anger at my mother actually comes from.” The words are almost identical to the first-level version, but the stance behind them has changed entirely. The speaker has loosened their grip on the answer and grown curious about their own experience, and this is the doorway through which everything else passes.

At the third level, a person begins to feel for something that words do not yet fit. Gendlin called this a direct reference, the felt sense of a meaning that is present in the body before it can be put into words. You can often hear it in the pauses, in the way a speaker checks a word against some inner sense of whether it is right. “It is not really anger I feel toward my mother. It is more like a heaviness, something dense in my chest.”

The fourth level is what happens when a person stays with that felt sense long enough that it begins to move. The heaviness becomes, as the speaker keeps attending to it, “a vast, helpless darkness, not exactly helplessness, more like trying to mop up the ocean.” Then, often with a small shock of recognition, something turns. “Of course. She had such a hard childhood, and I have been trying to take care of her my whole life, and I cannot. It is like mopping up the ocean.” That last shift, when the felt sense gives way and a new understanding arrives that logic alone could never have reached, is considered the highest level of experiencing, a process that engenders what Gendlin called a felt shift. It can bring about a profound new perspective on the situation. It is also, not coincidentally, much of what therapy is for.

What strikes me every time I sit with this scale is that certainty is the floor. It is the one level from which nothing new can come.

Dreams ask the same of us

Dreams make this requirement even more plainly than the consulting room does. A dream will not yield its meaning to a confident interpreter. The fastest way to learn nothing from a dream is to be sure you already know what it means, to reach for a dream dictionary, or to decide that the snake or the falling or the visiting dead must stand for one fixed thing. In the tradition I work in, imposing a meaning on someone’s dream is considered not just unhelpful but a kind of trespass, because meaning emerges from the dreamer, slowly, experientially, or it does not emerge at all.

I have witnessed this shift hundreds of times while working with dreamers, or my own dreams. A nightmare that has repeated for years will begin to change the moment the dreamer re-enters it with open curiosity rather than dread. When I guide someone to locate the supportive elements already present in a frightening dream and to stay with them, the dream itself often shifts. Terrifying figures soften, a dangerous fall lands gently, the whole scene reorganizes into something the dreamer could not have scripted in advance. The dream responds to the attitude we bring it, and the attitude that opens us to new understandings is not mastery but a willingness to sit with uncertainty.

A discipline of not-knowing

None of this is an argument against knowledge. There are moments when certainty is exactly what is needed, when a clear diagnosis opens the door to the right help, or when naming something plainly is itself a relief. I am not romanticizing confusion, and I am wary of the opposite excess, the swimmy posture that finds everything mysterious and refuses to commit to anything at all. My point is narrower and, I think, more useful. Certainty is a fine place to arrive at and a poor place to live from.

When being sure becomes a permanent residence, when we are certain about other people, about our own feelings, about what a dream or a symptom or a difficult day must mean, we lose the very capacity that lets us learn and change. There is a reason, I suspect, that we have a word for the way the confident mind talks itself out of reality. We call it rationalization. The certainty that feels like clarity is often the very thing holding a new understanding at bay.

The scale we built measures four levels, but it really points to a single movement, the small, courageous act of loosening our grip on what we already know. Whether we are sitting with a client, or with a dream, or simply with the ordinary fog of a hard week, the most fertile thing we can say is also the simplest. I am not sure yet. Let me stay with this a little longer.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Where in your own life has staying with not-knowing opened something that certainty had kept closed? For a fuller treatment of dreams as living, responsive processes, see my book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Demystifying Dreamwork (Routledge, 2025).

After more than a century of formal research, science still cannot tell us definitively why we have dreams. Philosophers, researchers and clinicians have many useful theories about dreaming, but there is no consensus. We dream for roughly two hours every night, often in spectacularly imaginative fashion. While we sleep, we conjure up detailed worlds populated by an odd mix of strangers, celebrities, people we’ve forgotten and people we love most. Our dreams can be set in impossible landscapes or achingly familiar ones, or a combination of both. Dreams engender feelings deep enough to linger for hours, sometimes years, after waking. The question, why do we dream is one of the oldest we humans ask ourselves.

First, a practical and obvious answer. For roughly 16 hours a day, we are bombarded with sensory input, and the pace of this barrage in modern life can be overwhelming. When we settle in to sleep, we close the gates to all of this sensory input, and for roughly eight hours, we can process and make sense of all the input in relative peace. But our brain doesn’t just shut off, it goes through a kind of wash cycle, first with deep rest and then cycles of dreaming where, among other things, we begin to integrate what’s important to us and weave it into the narrative of our lives.

In my clinical work with dreams, I have had the privilege to explore the nature of dreams in a meandering, experiential way with many clients and students. In the lab, the inquiry is more precise and systematic, and the two approaches are often worlds apart. Researchers apply exacting standards of proof and concern themselves with foundational questions about the nature of dreaming, including the tricky problem of how to glean empirical data from such a private, subjective experience. Clinicians are more concerned with personal and direct understandings: how can the dream serve the client in front of them? How do their dreams unfold over time? What are the enduring themes? So the answer to why we dream is different depending on how you approach the question.

After thirty years of working with dreams, I have come to believe that the question of why we dream may not even be the right one. Dreams seem to do so much at once that asking why we dream is like asking why we think. The answer, as the dream researcher Deirdre Barrett puts it, is “for everything.”

Many stories, all true yet incomplete

The modern science of dreaming began in 1953, when Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage most closely associated with vivid dreaming. Researchers thought they had finally found a window into the sleeping mind. Decades of work since has shown the picture is messier than that: we dream throughout the sleep cycle, not only in REM, and we sometimes don’t dream during REM at all. All mammals appear to dream, since they all experience REM, and humans get about ninety minutes of it each night. What remains an open question, despite all the inquiry, is the function of dreaming.

Four major theories have substantial research support, and rather than pitting one against the other, I tend to think they are all partly true. The first proposes dreams as a kind of simulation, a place where the mind rehearses scenarios it might face in waking life. Threatening scenarios are overrepresented in dreams, which makes evolutionary sense; our ancestors who practiced evading predators while asleep may have been better prepared to do so by day. More recent extensions of the theory broaden simulation to include social rehearsal, the working out of relationships and the small calibrations of belonging.

A second theory holds that dreams regulate emotion, metabolizing feelings we could not fully process during the day. Rosalind Cartwright’s research on people moving through the aftermath of divorce showed that those who dreamt directly about the marriage and its end recovered more quickly from situational depression than those whose dreams remained stuck in happier memories or who couldn’t recall dreaming at all. Cartwright described this as a “wake-sleep collaboration” — dreaming as a way to keep our behaviour flexible and metabolize unanticipated misfortunes. “Without enough dreaming,” she wrote, “we are stuck with our unregulated emotional memories.” In this widely-held view, the dreaming mind is doing real psychological work on our behalf.

A third theory positions dreams as central to memory consolidation. In a landmark experiment Harvard researchers Robert Stickgold and Erin Wamsley showed that subjects who learned a virtual maze and then napped and dreamt of maze-like material showed improvement in performance. Those who didn’t sleep at all, or those who slept but had no relevant dreams, did not improve their performance at all. The dreams themselves were strange and tangential, meeting a friend in a maze, travelling through bat caves, hearing the test’s background music. Stickgold quipped, “Profoundly useless, can we all agree on that?” Yet these were the people who improved. While there are some valid critiques of this research, there is also growing body of research linking dreaming and memory.

A fourth view is that dreams are vehicles for creativity and problem-solving. Dreams make associations far beyond what the linear waking mind can reach. Respected and prolific dream researcher Michael Schredl, after analyzing more than twelve thousand of his own dreams, concluded that creative problem solving is dreaming’s primary function. Newer theories continue to arrive. Erik Hoel proposes that dreams introduce noise and bizarreness to keep our brains from “overfitting” to recent experience, the way a machine learning model trained too tightly on old data fails when analyzing new situations. Stickgold and Antonio Zadra’s NEXTUP framework proposes that dreaming is the predictive brain exploring weak associations and possibilities that more focused waking thought never reaches. Other proposed purposes include dreams as imaginative play (Bulkeley), as increasing empathy (Blagrove and Lockheart), as protectors of sleep (Freud), and as compensation and information from the collective unconscious (Jung). The above list is long (and not nearly complete) because dreaming is doing so much at once, we need many theories to account for it.

Dreams are ‘not an alien intrusion’

Among the most respected dream researchers of the last century, Ernest Hartmann spent his career trying to make sense of this multiplicity. He came to see dreaming at one end of a continuum of mental activity, with focused waking thought at the other, and mind wandering and reverie somewhere between. Dreams, he argued, are “simply one form of mental functioning, not an alien intrusion.” What distinguishes dreaming from other forms of thought is not its occasionally bizarre content but what he called hyper-associativity. This is the dreaming mind’s capacity to weave together disparate elements (such as recent experience, emotional concerns, bodily signals, the vast archive of memory) into something original, surprising and reflective of the emotions most alive in us.

A dream, in Hartmann’s view, always brings something new; it is never simply a replay of the past. When the mind is in dreaming mode, it is more apt to make distant and unusual connections. Stickgold made the same point from a neurobiological lens: “The average person thinks the brain shuts off when you sleep, but the brain is working all night long.” It is the same brain “running a different program.”

Where the science fails us

For all that research has illuminated, there is a deep end of dreaming that current scientific methods cannot reach. People report dreams that seem to arrive from beyond their personal history: visitations from the dead that feel qualitatively different from ordinary dreams, encounters with autonomous and apparently wise presences, dreams that turn out to be prescient. Jung spoke of the collective unconscious, a vast reservoir of human experience the dreaming mind can tap into. Others have gone further, suggesting we dream not only as individuals but as part of a larger dreaming that moves through all of us.

I hold these possibilities with an open mind. What I know from decades of dream exploration is that dreams possess a remarkable emotional intelligence, an integrative capacity to reorganize experience in ways that have the power to move us deeply, both individually and collectively. The majority of our dreams are forgotten, which suggests they do their work whether we remember them or not. But when we engage with the dreams we do recall, we glimpse this intelligence at work.

Watching a dream change in the room

In thirty years of clinical practice, I have witnessed hundreds of people re-enter their dreams and experience them transforming in real time. I have seen nightmares that have repeated for years start to morph when the dreamer enters the dreamscape with more open curiosity. This shift away from fear and suspicion happens when I guide dreamers to first locate and embody the supportive elements already present in the dream. When they are able to do so, the dream changes too. For example, terrifying figures soften, dangerous falls land softly, or the whole constellation of the dream simply shifts to a new scene. These changes point toward something I have come to believe about dreaming itself: dreams are not static narratives but living processes that respond to our attention and the feelings we bring to them.

During the hours that we dream, we are not passive watchers — our brain and body are more active in some ways than when fully awake. In dreaming we are engaged in a process of emotional integration that continues all night. When we approach dreams with openness and respect, rather than trying to decipher them like puzzles or dismiss them as noise, they reveal themselves as collaborators in our own becoming.

A better question

So why do we dream? My truest answer is that dreaming is one of the mind’s most sophisticated ways of helping us become more fully ourselves. Dreams weave our scattered experiences into something uniquely meaningful, they help us process emotions we could not face by day, prepare us for challenges we haven’t yet encountered, and occasionally offer glimpses of the transcendent. They do all this while we sleep, whether we remember them or not.

The next time you wake from a vivid dream with the lingering sense that something important just happened, trust this feeling. The dreaming mind has been working through the night making connections, processing emotions, and integrating experiences that are important to you.

Why we dream may be the wrong question.

A better one is: how do we listen to our dreams in a way that allows us to collaborate with the depth of intelligence and integration they offer?

— — —

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. What has dreaming revealed to you? Have you had dreams that seemed to serve a clear purpose, or ones that defied any explanation? Why do you think we have dreams?

If you’re new here, you might want to start with my foundational essay, The Radical Intelligence of Dreaming, where I describe how I came to see dreams as an active process of emotional integration. For a fuller treatment of the science discussed in this piece, including the theories of Hartmann, Stickgold, Cartwright, Schredl and others, see Chapter 4 of my book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Demystifying Dreamwork (Routledge, 2025).

A growing number of people are typing their dreams into ChatGPT and asking what they mean. The interpretations come back quickly, sound thoughtful, sometimes uncannily so. Is the chatbot is doing real dreamwork, or producing something closer to the dream equivalent of a horoscope?

A new study from Mark Blagrove’s team at Swansea University, takes the question seriously. Thirty participants reported a recent dream, along with an account of their recent waking life and their own associations to the dream’s elements. They submitted all three reports to ChatGPT, asked what their dream meant, and then rated the response using the Gains from Dream Interpretation questionnaire, the same instrument used to evaluate dream groups and therapy sessions. The design lets us compare ChatGPT’s output, in measurable terms, to what people gain from sitting with another human being.

What the chatbot does well, and where it falls short

On the surface, the results are flattering to ChatGPT. Participants rated the interpretations as moderately to very accurate, with a mean of 7.33 on a 9-point scale. On the personal insight subscale, ChatGPT was statistically comparable to results from live dream groups, suggesting that dreamers came away with some genuine sense of having learned about themselves.

The deeper measure tells a different story. Exploration-insight, which captures how thoroughly the dream was examined and how much the dreamer connected it to their waking life, was significantly lower for ChatGPT than for any of the comparison studies, including both lay-group discussions and therapist-led work. Every individual item on that subscale scored lower for the chatbot. Whatever ChatGPT is doing, it is not the kind of exploration that emerges when people work on a dream together.

Blagrove and colleagues are honest about a complication: the Barnum effect. Named after the showman who supposedly said there’s a sucker born every minute, this is the well-documented tendency for people to read generic descriptions, like horoscopes, and feel they are remarkably accurate. ChatGPT is very good at producing language that sounds personal while remaining flexible enough to fit almost anyone, and that flexibility may be inflating the accuracy ratings.

If you use a chatbot to comment on your dream, ask this: Is it really meeting your dream? Or is it offering something more generic which your mind then maps onto your life because that is what minds do?

What is missing from a typed exchange

The findings make sense once you think about what dreamwork actually is. A dream group or a therapy session does much more than produce a correct interpretation. The real work happens in staying with an image long enough for the body to respond, in hearing how a phrase lands in someone else’s ear, in noticing what shifts when an emotion is named aloud. It depends on a back-and-forth that includes silence, breath, and the small adjustments people make when something feels true.

ChatGPT’s protocol in this study was a single input and a single output, with no follow-up questions and no opportunity for the dreamer to say, that doesn’t quite fit, can we look again? The researchers note this as a limitation of their design, and they are right; real-world AI use tends to involve more back-and-forth. Even so, no chatbot can register a tear, a deep breath, or the moment a client goes still because they have just touched something important. No chatbot can bring the warmth of lived presence.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the technology entirely. For someone who has never thought of dreams as worth attending to, the chatbot may be a useful first door. A dream group or a therapist takes time to find and money to engage, while ChatGPT sits on every phone, available the moment a dream surfaces, before the images thin out. As a way to capture and structure a dream, to set down the waking-life context and the associations while they are still fresh, it can be a real tool. As a substitute for the deeper work, it falls short.

A test case: Returning the money dream

I decided to ask Chat GPT how would interpret my recent dream: I dreamt that an impoverished woman walks by me with a handful of cash. Not a lot and she holds the bills loosely, drops a couple of one-dollar bills. She is prepared to give them to me. They are caught in the wind, blowing away and I catch them with great dexterity. I run to catch up to her, give them back, fold the bills into her hands and close her hands around them to secure them in her grip.

Here is the response from the chatbot: “A poor woman passes by with only a little money. It is not abundance, not excess—it is just enough. And even that is at risk of being lost. The wind lifts two small bills, almost as if to test whether they will remain hers.

What stands out is your response. There is no hesitation, no confusion. You move with great dexterity—a phrase that carries both skill and immediacy. You catch what is slipping away, and then, importantly, you return it. Not casually, but with care: folding the bills into her hands, closing them gently, helping her hold on.

This feels less like a question of generosity and more like a recognition of stewardship. You are not taking what is offered, even though she seems prepared to give it. You are preserving what is hers.

There is also something about smallness here. Two one-dollar bills. Not dramatic wealth, but something modest that still matters. The psyche often uses small denominations to speak about subtle but essential resources—energy, attention, meaning, even time.”

I worked on this dream with my dream partner Robbyn as well, and to be fair, we had the luxury of many back-and-forth exchanges. None of the Chat-GPT responses really landed with me. Robbyn asked a lot more about what it felt like to catch the bills with such skill and deliver them with such care. I felt there was something important in the way my body moved with such competence when I had no time to think and just let my body do its job.

I notice many instances in Chat GPT’s short reply where it editorializes. This is something I advise my dreamwork students to studiously avoid. How does it know the return of the bills was not generosity, but rather an act of stewardship? And wow, does the statement that the small denomination of the bills relates to ‘subtle resources of energy, attention, meaning and time’ feel like a huge leap. Given my bias that only the dreamer can truly sense into the dream’s meaning, I find any such interpretive statements as grossly overstepping.

To be fair, knowing this bias of mine, Chat GPT did ask, at the end:

‘If you were to “feel into” this dream rather than concluding, I would be curious about a few experiential openings: What is it like, in your body, to catch the money so deftly? What do you feel as you close the woman’s hands around it?’ I think: Now we’re getting somewhere.

I would have preferred to start with this deepening of experience, of course, and let my felt sense of these impactful places in the dream speak to me through my own body’s wisdom – long before I read any opinions or interpretations. And I will always vastly prefer the warmth and connection of working a dream with a human partner. ChatGPT can offer a first reading that may bring up some points that resonate, and for someone curious about their inner life, this may be exactly the invitation they need to get started. But I am convinced that the deeper work still requires another human, a body in the room, and the time and depth of exchange it takes for an image to open.

Reference: Blagrove, M., Roklicer, L., Bueno, J., Austin, O., Foster, H., & Webb, M. (2026). Ratings of accuracy and insight following dream interpretation by ChatGPT. International Journal of Dream Research, 19(1), 105–114.

To go deeper: If you are a clinician or dream enthusiast who wants to immerse more fully into the practice of Embodied Experiential Dreamwork, you are welcome to join our year-long program, now taking applications for the Sept. 2026 cohort. See https://www.drleslieellis.com/embodied-experiential-certification

Science has been measuring sleep from the outside for decades, and getting it only partly right. We count hours, track sleep stages, measure brain waves, and declare whether a night was good or bad based on numbers. But anyone who has ever woken from a vivid, absorbing dream and felt deeply rested experiences something the instruments have been missing. A new study puts data behind what experiential dreamworkers and depth psychologists have long intuited: that what happens inside our sleeping minds, the subjective texture of our dream life, matters as much as objective measures of sleep depth. Dreams help us stay asleep by giving our nocturnal thoughts somewhere to go.

The study, led by a team using high-density EEG and over a thousand awakenings across 196 nights, found something counter-intuitive. As the night progresses and the brain’s built-in pressure to sleep naturally eases (we accumulate what we need in the first half of the night, and the drive gradually lets up), our percept…

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You lie awake at 2 a.m., acutely aware of every second ticking away. Your mind races with thoughts about tomorrow, about sleep itself, about whether you will ever sleep again. The harder you try to fall asleep, the further sleep recedes. This is not insomnia as most people understand it. This is cognitive hyperarousal, a state of mental alert that Colin Espie, professor of sleep medicine, describes as the hallmark of sleep onset insomnia. It exists in direct opposition to the relaxed, diffuse attention that actual sleep requires.

The paradox is not new, but it is deeply misunderstood. Sleep is a relationship you restore through a kind of paradoxical surrender, not a problem you solve through force of will. This distinction, counterintuitive as it may seem, sits at the heart of why so many people fail with conventional sleep advice and why embodied experiential approaches work where sheer determination fails.

The Effort Trap

Espie’s attention-intention-effort model reveals the mechanism at work. When you focus intently on falling asleep, you paradoxically activate the same neural networks that keep you awake. Your brain interprets this focused effort as a threat. Something must be wrong if you have to try this hard. The mind responds by heightening arousal, scanning the environment for the danger you seem convinced is there. Psychologist and sleep researcher Allison Harvey’s cognitive model of insomnia describes how this pattern becomes a learned behaviour: the bedroom becomes a cue for wakefulness rather than sleep, thoughts about sleep inability spiral, and the insomniac builds a narrative of incompetence around their own sleep capacity.

Matthew Walker and other sleep neuroscientists point out that the brain does not have an on-switch for sleep. You cannot will yourself into slumber any more than you can will yourself to fall in love. Sleep is a state that emerges when the conditions are right, when the body’s temperature, chemistry, and circadian alignment all converge. The moment you begin to try, you have already moved away from those conditions.

If your relationship to sleep is fraught with frustration, the first thing you need to shift is your relationship to sleep itself, and to the normal periods of wakefulness that can punctuate it. Your efforts, ideally, are not directed toward sleep, itself but instead to the deliberate cultivation of a different relationship to wakefulness, to the body, and to the night itself. This is where embodied experiential approaches shine.

Coming Home to the Body

Psychologist/philosopher Eugene Gendlin’s concept of the felt sense offers a direct route out of the cognitive trap. When insomnia takes hold, consciousness lives almost entirely in thought. The felt sense is where we sense reality before thought organizes it. It is the subtle bodily knowing that exists beneath and before language, and it is where true change begins.

Gendlin’s focusing practice invites people to pause, to notice what arises in the body when you turn toward it with friendly curiosity and ask into what is present. Not why am I anxious? Not what does this mean? But simply, what is the quality of what I feel right now? This shift from interpretation to sensation immediately quiets the narrative loop. A person lying awake with mind spinning can pause and ask, where do I feel this in my body? Perhaps it’s a knot in the chest, tension in the jaw, or a sense of heaviness. The moment you place attention on the felt sense, the mind quiets and the anxious story begins to dissolve.

A client of mine, a corporate attorney who had fought insomnia for years, and who learned focusing in our sessions, described the shift this way: ‘I learned to simply notice the tightness in my shoulders. I didn’t try to fix it or understand it. I just felt it. And as I stayed with it, something in me softened. For the first time in months, sleep didn’t feel like a distant target I was missing. It felt like something my body wanted and could have.’ This is the power of coming back to the body, where sleep lives. It is not found in the problem-solving mind.

Yoga Nidra and the Art of Surrender

Yoga Nidra, or yogic sleep, offers something even more structured: a guided system for systematically releasing layers of tension and vigilance. Recent research demonstrates significant improvements in insomnia and sleep quality through regular Yoga Nidra practice, and the results are particularly striking for people struggling with sleep onset and maintenance issues.

Jennifer Piercy, a sleep educator with over 21 million plays on Insight Timer, has brought this ancient practice into the modern era with her work on what she calls healing darkness. Piercy, who studied with sleep medicine integrationist Rubin Naiman, speaks of night vision not as the ability to see in darkness but as the capacity to be at home there, to befriend the night rather than regard it with the anxiety that keeps so many people trapped in insomnia.

Yoga Nidra works by moving awareness through different layers of the body and mind in a systematic sequence. You begin in the waking state, move into the hypnagogic threshold where sleep begins to dawn, and rest in that liminal space. The practice offers something easier than sleep as a goal to be achieved: complete rest while consciousness remains.

While many people do fall asleep during Yoga Nidra, the practice itself is so restful that the pressure to fall asleep lessens. And when the pressure dissolves, sleep often follows naturally. Focusing on enjoying deep relaxation and not worrying so much about sleep paradoxically makes it easier to sleep. And even when sleep does not come, this relaxed deep rest offers many of sleep’s benefits. This knowledge alone may take some sleep pressure off.

Waking in the Night: A Misframed Problem

One of the most damaging myths about sleep is that you should sleep through the night without waking. Naiman has termed the modern expectation of consolidated eight-hour sleep as a waking disorder, not a sleeping one. For most of human history, segmented sleep was the norm. We had first and second sleep, separated by an hour or two of quiet wakefulness.

When insomnia treatment helps people sleep better, often what has shifted is not the elimination of nocturnal awakenings but the person’s relationship to them. Instead of viewing a 3 a.m. awakening as a failure, as evidence of broken sleep, you can understand it as a natural variation in sleep architecture. The body may wake briefly for any number of reasons: a slight drop in core temperature, a shift in sleep stage, a vivid dream. The question is not how to prevent waking but how to allow the mind to return to sleep without the panic and rumination that transforms a simple arousal into hours of wakefulness.

Embodied approaches help with this reframing. When you wake in the night, instead of tensing against the waking and spiraling into worry, you might use a simple body scan: notice where you feel ease in your body, where there is natural softness. This shifts attention from the problem (I am awake) to resource (this part of me is already at rest). A brief Yoga Nidra sequence or even a few minutes of conscious breathing can guide you back toward sleep without the struggle that transforms normal arousal into chronic insomnia.

When the Sleeping Mind Dreams Solutions

Targeted dream incubation, the practice of seeding a theme or question at the edge of sleep so the dreaming mind takes it up, has roots stretching back to the ancient Greek healing temples and has been studied in various forms for decades. More recently, Adam Haar Horowitz and colleagues at MIT’s Media Lab have developed technologies to study this threshold. Their original Dormio device, a wearable glove that tracks heart rate, muscle tone, and skin conductance, detects the onset of hypnagogia and delivers precisely timed audio cues. The project has since expanded to include an eyelid-monitoring mask, an EEG headband, and a browser-based platform called Dormio Light that allows remote, sensor-free dream incubation. Their findings are consistent and promising: even minimal prompts delivered at the hypnagogic threshold reliably shape dream content, and dreaming on a specific topic measurably enhances post-sleep creativity related to that topic.

For people working with insomnia, this research has practical implications. Targeted dream incubation can be woven into audio practices designed for the transition into sleep, inviting the sleeping mind to explore themes of safety, rest, and self-compassion. The dreaming mind can be integral to healing work around insomnia. My work to support engaging with dreams, and befriending them (even nightmares) can also help, especially for those who defer sleep to avoid bad dreams.

Building the Practice

The beauty of embodied approaches to insomnia is that they translate readily into audio form. A person can listen to a guided Yoga Nidra practice, a focused body scan, or a breath sequence as they lie in bed. These are not sleep-inducing recordings in the traditional sense. They do not seduce or trick the brain. Rather, they offer a structured framework that moves attention out of the narrative mind and into the body, where sleep actually originates.

The most effective audio practices combine several elements: explicit permission to rest without the goal of sleep, systematic body awareness, breath work that calms the nervous system, and subtle suggestions that invite the mind toward themes of safety and belonging. Some incorporate elements of Gendlin’s focusing, pausing at points to invite internal noticing. Others layer in dream incubation language, speaking directly to the sleeping mind.

I have been developing a seven-night audio course on insomnia that weaves these threads together, designed to be listened to nightly. (It is available mid-May via the DUST app.) Each night targets a different aspect of the insomnia paradox, moving from understanding cognitive hyper-arousal through body awareness, falling asleep with gentle practices, navigating nocturnal waking, and finally, cultivating a genuine relationship to night, sleep and dreams. It is the practical expression of what I discuss in my clinical work and in my book, now in its second edition, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy.

Sleep as Relationship, Not Problem

The deepest shift in working with insomnia is the one that reframes it entirely. The capacity for sleep emerges when you stop fighting and start listening. When you stop trying to solve sleep via goal-oriented techniques and instead develop a genuine relationship to rest, to the body, to the night, something fundamental changes.

Naiman speaks of falling in love with night, and this phrase captures something essential. The person with chronic insomnia has often grown to fear or resent the night. It is the time when they are most vulnerable to failure, most aware of their exhaustion. To heal this, you must reverse the narrative. Night is not your enemy. It is a partner, one you are learning to dance with again.

Embodied experiential approaches work because they do something simpler and more honest than conventional sleep advice. They do not pretend you can think or force yourself into sleep. Instead, they invite you to feel your way back toward it. They ask you to notice what your body already knows: that rest is your birthright, that sleep is natural, and that the obstacle has never been incapacity but rather the very effort you have been expending to overcome it. The answer was always there, in the body, in the breath, in the quiet knowing that lives beneath words. Sleep, after all, is something your body already knows how to do. Your only job is to get out of its way.

References

Bellaiche, L., Haar Horowitz, A., McClay, M., Bottary, R., Denis, D., Chen, C., Maes, P., & Seli, P. (2024). Targeted dream incubation at a distance: The development of a remote and sensor-free tool for incubating hypnagogic dreams and mind-wandering. Frontiers in Sleep, 3, Article 1258345. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsle.2024.1258345

Breus, M. (2016). The power of when: Discover your chronotype. Little, Brown Spark.

Dutta, A., et al. (2025). Efficacy of yoga nidra in managing sleep disorders: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1177/27683605251390728

Ellis, L. (2025). A clinician’s guide to dream therapy: Demystifying dreamwork (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Espie, C. A., Broomfield, N. M., MacMahon, K. M., Macphee, L. M., & Taylor, L. M. (2006). The attention-intention-effort pathway in the development of psychophysiologic insomnia: A theoretical review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 10(4), 215–245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2006.03.002

Gendlin, E. T. (1981). Focusing (2nd ed.). Bantam Books.

Haar Horowitz, A., Cunningham, T. J., Maes, P., & Stickgold, R. (2020). Dormio: A targeted dream incubation device. Consciousness and Cognition, 83, Article 102938. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102938

Haar Horowitz, A., Esfahany, K., Gálvez, T. V., Maes, P., & Stickgold, R. (2023). Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 7319. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31361-w

Harvey, A. G. (2002). A cognitive model of insomnia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(8), 869–893. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(01)00061-4

Naiman, R. (2006). Healing night: The science and spirit of sleeping, dreaming, and awakening. Syren Book Company.

Piercy, J. (n.d.). Sacred Sleep Yoga, https://www.sacredsleepyoga.com

Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.

In her recurring nightmare, Anya is always trapped in her former house deep in a war-torn city filled with random explosions and widespread suffering. The dream version of the house echoes the horrors of the war: she is trapped inside and the walls are closing in on her, collapsing inward. There are no doors, no windows, no means of escape. So many nights, she would wake in terror, with the impending sensation of being crushed. The dream followed her across continents, through a new marriage, into a new life. It did not care that she was safe now. Randomly, or during times of stress, it kept returning.

When Anya (not her real name) came to therapy, she had nearly given up hope that anything could change. She had tried not thinking about the dream, tried sleeping pills, tried telling herself she was now safe and doing well. But nothing offered more than temporary relief. The nightmare seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and would reappear far too frequently, wreaking havoc on her…

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The study, led by Garrett Baber and colleagues at the University of Kansas, tested a prominent theory that has been gaining traction in sleep science for the past decade or so. The idea, rooted in the neuroscience of fear extinction, proposes that dreaming functions something like a natural form of exposure therapy. You encounter frightening content in the safe container of sleep, the theory goes, and this gradually reduces the emotional charge of those fears in waking life. It’s an elegant hypothesis, and it has informed several therapeutic approaches. But when Baber’s team put it to the t…

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Few dreams are as universal and alarming as the crumbling sensation of your teeth as they begin to loosen and fall away. At first, perhaps you feel a tooth wobble under your tongue. Then another. Soon your whole mouth is decaying, your teeth falling out in pieces. The sensation is so physical that you wake with a deep sense of unease, and the question: what does it mean?

Because the teeth-falling-out dream is so vivid, people assume it must carry a powerful symbolic message. Teeth are tied to our appearance, our speech, our age, our sense of strength. It is easy to imagine that such dreams reflect anxiety or loss of youth, beauty, even of our very life. While at times those themes do resonate with the dreamer’s waking life, there is a simpler explanation. When we consider how dreams actually arise, another layer of explanation is plausible, one rooted in the living body during sleep.

The dream-body connection

Dreaming does not unfold apart from the body. Even in the depths of sleep, the brain continues to receive a steady stream of sensory information. In the mouth, sensations of pressure, dryness, irritation, the rhythm of breathing, and the position of muscles and joints all continue to flow through the nervous system. The dreaming mind, with its remarkable capacity for imagery, gathers these signals and shapes them into scenes and experiences that feel meaningful from the inside.

We see this process everywhere in dreaming. A full bladder becomes a frantic search for a bathroom. A noise from the world outside the bedroom finds its way into the unfolding story: the alarm clock becomes a church bell, for example. A blanket wound around the legs becomes standing in a tangle of snakes. The mind does not ignore the body during sleep; it incorporates it, translating sensation into image.

The mouth is one of the most sensitive regions of the body. The teeth, gums, tongue, and jaw are threaded with nerves that detect the slightest change in pressure or tension. When those sensations arise during sleep, the dreaming mind may give them shape through imagery that mirrors the experience itself. Pressure along the jaw may evoke a dream of teeth cracking or shifting. Irritation in the gums may take form as a tooth loosening or falling away.

Perhaps check with your dentist, not your therapist

Dentists have begun to recognize just how closely oral health and sleep physiology are intertwined. The mouth can reveal a great deal about what the body is doing overnight. The tissues of the mouth and airway are deeply involved in breathing patterns, muscle tone, and jaw position during sleep. When those systems become disrupted, the signs often appear first in the mouth.

One of the most common examples is sleep bruxism: the grinding or clenching of teeth during the night. Many people assume grinding simply reflects daytime stress, yet sleep specialists have found that it often accompanies unstable breathing during sleep. When the airway begins to narrow, the brain sometimes activates the jaw muscles in an effort to stabilize the airway and reopen the passage for air. The jaw tightens, the teeth press together, and the cycle can repeat many times throughout the night.

Within the imaginative landscape of dreaming, these sensations may appear in alarming ways. The pressure of grinding can become the feeling of teeth splintering, cracking, or dropping from the mouth as the dream gives form to what the body is experiencing.

Dentists often recognize other signs that sleep may be less restorative than it appears. Flattened chewing surfaces, chipped enamel, or hairline fractures in the teeth can reflect long-standing grinding. A scalloped tongue, its edges gently pressed by the teeth, can suggest persistent muscular tension during sleep. Dry mouth upon waking, inflamed gums, or morning jaw soreness may point toward mouth breathing or repeated brief awakenings through the night.

Mouth breathing plays an important role in this story as well. Saliva normally protects the teeth and regulates the oral microbiome, bathing the mouth with antimicrobial compounds and buffering the acids that bacteria produce. During sleep, saliva production naturally declines. When breathing shifts to the mouth for long stretches, tissues dry out more easily and inflammation can take hold.

From the perspective of sleep physiology, mouth breathing also affects the stability of the airway. Nasal breathing helps regulate airflow and supports the tone of the airway throughout the night. When breathing occurs primarily through the mouth, the airway becomes more vulnerable to narrowing and collapse, contributing to snoring and obstructive sleep apnea.

Even small dental problems can interfere with rest in ways people rarely suspect. A mild cavity or irritated tooth may barely register during the day, when attention is scattered across countless tasks. In the stillness of night, those signals can become more noticeable. A few simple habits can support both oral health and sleep quality: flossing before bed, staying hydrated, developing awareness of breathing patterns during the day, and seeking professional help if needed.

When teeth fall out in a dream, the image may indeed be a metaphor for something being lost or decayed in waking life. Alternatively, the dream may be reflecting the physical body. This flow from body sensation to dream image can warn of many other health conditions beyond sleep apnea and oral health.

Dreams and the body: Early warning signs

According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, dreams are, “directly or distortedly, reflections of current states of body and mind.” They can reflect neurological disorders, which he said can alter dreaming processes in specific ways. For example, the loss of visual imagery in dreams is a possible precursor to Alzheimer’s, and recovery dreams can presage remission from multiple sclerosis. Sacks hypothesized that the dreaming mind is more sensitive than the waking mind to small changes in the body, and can appear prescient because it picks up subtle early cues.

So when you dream of your teeth falling out, or other alarming physical experiences, consider the obvious first. The dream may be simply listening to your body and presenting an image of what it hears.

In a nightmare that haunted her, Carol dreamt she was walking beside a river carrying a newborn baby. The setting is lush and peaceful, with apple trees gracing the riverbank. She proudly shows the baby to her mother. The baby’s father (who, oddly, she does not know) and his father are there too. They are conferring on what to name the child. The atmosphere is warm, almost ceremonial: a new life is being welcomed and given a name.

But then her mother notices the baby has stopped breathing.

Carol looks down and sees the infant gasping desperately for air. Panic surges through her as she runs to find help. The baby tries so hard to breath her head pops off! The dream ends there, leaving Carol shaken by the image and left with the desolate sense that something precious has been lost.

Carol offered this dream during an embodied experi…

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If you (or a loved one) has ever experienced depression, you probably know the feeling of waking up in a darker mood than when you went to bed, of wanting just to pull the covers over your head and fend off the day.

What if you could send specific signals during sleep to help you wake up refreshed instead? Imagine if rather than taking a pill or facing another night of restless rumination, you don a set of headphones engineered to play music at a targeted time in your sleep cycle to infiltrate your mind with more positive content.

This is what’s possible with Targeted Memory Reactivation. A new paper advocates for developing treatments for trauma and depression based on this method. The way forward looks promising, with a few caveats.

What Is Targeted Memory Reactivation?

TMR, in its basic form, is a simple audio cue paired with a specific piece of information or experience during wakefulness. That same sound is then played softly while the person is asleep. The sleeping brain, hearing it…

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Yes, you read that correctly.

Not what does my dream mean, but how does it mean?

So often, someone comes to me carrying a dream that feels numinous, and mysteriously imbued with meaning: a house filling slowly with water, a wolf standing watch at the edge of a dark forest, a child wandering through a sinister cityscape. They always want to know, “What does it mean?”

It is such a natural question. Dream images often arrive charged with feeling, saturated with atmosphere, lingering in the body. With dreams that leave this kind of lasting residue, there is a sense that the dream has something important to tell us.

And yet meaning in dreaming is not the same thing as explanation.

Dreams almost never present a life situation and then proceed to spell out what we should do about it. They do not offer instructions in tidy, declarative sentences. They are not PowerPoint slides from the unconscious mind.

They are invitations.

Dreamspeak is Not Logic

When we are dreaming, the part of the brain that org…

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Feeling heard is one of the most intimate forms of connection we know. It is not dramatic or spectacular, and yet when it is absent the body recognizes the loss immediately. Most of us know the quiet, sinking moment when we are speaking from somewhere tender or alive and the listener’s attention drifts. Their eyes glaze slightly, their energy turns elsewhere, and something in us collapses. The words lose warmth. What was gathering meaning begins to thin and fade.

I was reminded of this recently while watching members of Congress question Pam Bondi. What struck me most was not the political content, but the near total absence of genuine dialogue. There was little sense of listening in the room, only performance, interruption, and the rehearsed cadence of positions already formed. It felt like the opposite of communication.

Behind her sat survivors of Epstein’s abuse, people already carrying profound injury, now subjected to a second wound: the absence of acknowledgment in a space ostensibly devoted to justice. The moment was painful to witness. It revealed, with unusual clarity, the harm that occurs when listening disappears from our shared life.

It also stirred in me a renewed urgency to articulate what true listening looks like, and why its loss is never neutral.

What true listening looks like

Neuroscience is beginning to describe what lived experience has always made clear. Experiences of attuned listening are associated with patterns of neural activity linked to safety, social bonding, and emotional regulation. When we feel accompanied, the nervous system softens and the body shifts away from vigilance toward connection. To be heard is not only comforting; it is regulating and, in a very real sense, protective.

The absence of this kind of connection carries its own weight. A growing body of research now links chronic loneliness and perceived social disconnection with depression, cardiovascular illness, cognitive decline, and even earlier mortality. The opposite of listening is therefore not only discouraging or disappointing, but also biologically consequential.

And yet the presence of a genuinely interested listener can feel deeply affirming, and can even fuel our own creativity. Thoughts that were vague begin to take shape. Emotions that were tangled start to organize themselves. Meaning gathers, almost of its own accord. Something living seems to grow in the shared space between two people. This tangible connective overlap brings energy of its own, like a gentle tailwind.

In the language of Focusing, we might say that a relational field begins to form. When another person listens with patience, curiosity, and restraint, the felt sense within us becomes clearer and more articulate. Implicit knowing starts to unfold into words, images, or gestures. The next step, which cannot be imposed from outside, begins to emerge from within the person’s own living process. Focusing founder Eugene Gendlin understood this with precision. Genuine change does not arrive through persuasion or correction, but through renewed contact with one’s own experiencing. Listening is what makes that contact possible.

Exquisite Listening: A Gentle Act of Resistance

This makes the erosion of listening in contemporary life especially concerning. Communication now moves at extraordinary speed, attention is continually divided, and much of our interaction occurs outside real time through digital mediation. Under these conditions, immediate response is often valued more than presence, and certainty more than curiosity. Exquisite listening becomes more scarce just when it is most needed. Practicing it can feel like a quiet act of resistance against isolation.

What, then, allows listening to become transformative rather than merely polite?

First, seek to understand fully

To become a deep listener, we need to exercise the discipline of understanding before responding. Most of us begin forming replies while the other person is still speaking. Advice organizes itself, comparisons arise, and our own related stories press for expression. This is deeply human, yet it divides attention.

To listen exquisitely is to let the other person’s words arrive fully and to allow their meaning to register not only cognitively but bodily. Research on the therapeutic alliance consistently shows that perceived empathy and accurate understanding predict positive outcomes more strongly than specific techniques. It turns out, in therapy and in life, the most helpful thing is to communicate our understanding in a way that is tangibly felt. For this to happen, the listener must truly receive the speaker.

Never interrupt, with one exception

There is also the protection of the speaker’s unfolding process. Interruptions, whether intrusive or enthusiastic, can fracture the delicate movement by which thoughts and feelings are forming. There is, however, a small exception: when we do not quite hear or understand what the speaker is saying. Clarification offered with humility can deepen rather than disrupt the sense of being accompanied. A simple question that communicates sincere desire to understand can itself be an act of care.

Resist the urge to advise

Exquisite listening requires trust in the speaker’s own inner knowing. Unsolicited advice often appears generous, yet it can subtly imply that the listener knows better than the one living the experience. Across client-centered therapy, Focusing-oriented practice, and contemporary psychotherapy research, we find a converging insight: people move forward most deeply when they discover their own next step from within. Guidance offered too early is rarely integrated.

The listener’s task, then, is both simple and demanding—to remain present, to trust the process, and to accompany without overtaking. In this delicate dance, the one speaking should have the lead.

What can be offered instead of solutions is understanding shaped into language, gesture, expression, or tone. This is not a mechanical repetition of words, but a response that shows the experience has been digested and received. Empathy does not require agreement; it requires recognition. When someone feels fully understood, defensiveness softens and new possibilities become imaginable. Psychological research describes this as increased openness following validation. In the language of Focusing, we might call it a felt shift. Either way, movement occurs. Gendlin observed that this shift arises from within the person or not at all.

True listening takes discipline

Exquisite listening can appear passive, when in fact a disciplined and generous form of attention. It asks us to set aside performance, certainty, and the impulse to fix. It asks for patience with silence and respect for the slow intelligence of experience as it unfolds.

In a time marked by loneliness, polarization, and relentless noise, this gentle discipline begins to look like a form of medicine. To be fully heard allows the body to rest. From that rest, meaning can emerge. And from meaning, the next step, often small and subtle yet profoundly right, has room to appear.

Perhaps this is where healing so often begins: not in advice or intervention, but in the simple, transformative experience of not being alone inside one’s own life.

References

Cacioppo, J. T., & Cacioppo, S. (2018). Loneliness in the modern age: An evolutionary theory of loneliness (ETL). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 58, 127–197.

Elliott, R., Bohart, A. C., Watson, J. C., & Greenberg, L. S. (2018). Empathy. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 399–410.

Gendlin, E. T. (1996). Focusing-oriented psychotherapy: A manual of the experiential method. Guilford Press.

Holt-Lunstad, J. (2021). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors: The power of social connection in prevention. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, 15(5), 567–573.

Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. Crown.

Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J. (2019). Psychotherapy relationships that work III. Psychotherapy, 56(4), 423–430.

Zaki, J. (2020). The war for kindness: Building empathy in a fractured world. Crown.

Dreaming can be a profound encounter with the deeper layers of our psyche. And yet so many dreams go untended, like a meaningful letter you haven’t opened.

I’d love to invite you into two doorways to deepen into your dream experience in the coming weeks.

February 23

Free Introduction to Embodied Experiential (EE) Dreamwork
A 90-minute guided session

In this introductory gathering, you’ll be guided to deepen into a dream or daydream, anchor it in the body, and allow its natural wisdom to unfold. This offers a sense of the approach at the heart of my year-long clinical dreamwork training — and all are welcome.

The session will include:

• Guided experiential practice and debrief

• An overview of the EE method

• A live demonstration with a volunteer (time permitting)

• Time for questions, reflection, and shared learning

No prior experience is needed. You’re welcome to bring a short dream to explore, or simply arrive as you are. Part of this work is discovering how images can emerge naturally from waking day…

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With the torrent of AI-generated writing flooding the world, it’s more important than ever to attend to the kind of organic intelligence that emerges from our dreams, reveries, and from the creative process itself.

Our brains are already pre-programmed pattern recognition machines that steer us down habitually well-worn pathways. AI just reinforces this. In general, what seem like our own ideas and plans are typically pathways of least resistance built on a lifetime of unconscious programming. Cognitive neuroscientists tell us there is no such thing as free will. Rather, the things we decide to do are almost exclusively automatic; we simply justify our decisions after the fact, and they feel like our own.

This makes it difficult to have an original thought or make any real change, even if we have the best of intentions. Our dream…

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I’m just back from MIT’s Dream Engineering Symposium, and I only noticed my conference badge for the first time as I was packing to leave. It reads: “Leslie Ellis, Independent.”

I love that. Everyone else had impressive institutional affiliations – MIT, Stanford, Harvard, sleep labs and research centres. Here I am, someone who spent 25+ years in clinical practice working deeply with people’s dreams, who now teaches and writes about dream and nightmare treatment for the benefit of other clinicians. I was one of the few who isn’t primarily a researcher.

Still, my talk was well received. They liked the phrase I used: the radical intelligence of dreaming. It seemed to land in a room full of scientists discussing how to capture, guide, and “engineer” dreams to make them more productive, more lucid, more controlled. I suggested because dreams have such depth and creativity, we might want to collaborate with them, not try to control them.

Let me show you what I mean.

I told the story of Anya, a …

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We know more than ever about dreams and nightmares. Although they retain their air of mystery, dream engineers are penetrating their secrets in a variety of innovative ways. In her book, Nightmare Obscura, Michelle Carr documents the generative and fascinating experience of spending much of her life shedding light on dreaming’s enduring secrets. This journey has taken her through various sleep labs around the world as she experiments with how to infiltrate and impact our dreams and nightmares in helpful ways.

It’s time to take dreams seriously

Something critically important has emerged from all of this inquiry that underscores the need for all of us, but particularly the medical community, to take dreams more seriously. Carr writes: “Any consideration of dreaming has been especially absent from physical medicine, where dreams hav…

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In Lisa’s dream, she is being held down on an operating table, and an albino surgeon is about to remove the snakes from her wrists. She awoke from this nightmare mystified and disturbed. We walk through this dream together, and at one point, I suggest she ‘become’ the surgeon, an ambiguous character she isn’t sure she can trust. In that moment, everything becomes brightly lit, white and numinous. The dream shape shifts into a kind of spiritual awakening…

Nightmares occupy a uniquely challenging corner of the dream world. They are the worst of dreams in the sense that they are consistently linked with human distress: higher rates of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress; disrupted sleep architecture; difficulties with emotional regulation; increased cardiovascular health risks, suicide, and lowered life expectancy. They …

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Something softens.
Something good-willed rises up.
A patient, attentive field forms almost of its own accord.

We don’t fully understand why this happens, but we feel it. And in a recent class, Carly, one of my focusing and dreamwork students named it plainly. At the end of a long morning she said:

“There’s a kind of benevolence here I don’t feel in other trainings.
Where does it come from?”

Her question stayed with me long after Zoom was closed. It feels like such a worthy question to ponder because right now, the world needs more of this.

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For many who have experienced trauma, the impact doesn’t end with waking. Nightmares can be a persistent, distressing echo of past events, leaving you exhausted, re-traumatized, and robbed of restful sleep. Finding effective strategies to quiet traumatic nightmares is a significant step toward reclaiming peace. Such strategies may be more accessible than you think, both for dreamers and the therapists who support them.

As someone deeply committed to helping individuals navigate the complex terrain of trauma recovery, I am always on the lookout for innovative approaches. One noteable recent study highlights the potential of lucid dream workshops for reducing PTSD symptoms and distressing nightmares (Yount et al., 2025). What I find most interesting about the study is that it supports the use of integrative, experiential approache…

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