Emotional Truth of Dreams

Willow Pearson Trimbach, PsyD, LMFT, MT-BC, is Professor and Director of Clinical Training, Clinical Psychology Department, California Institute of Integral Studies. Dr. Pearson Trimbach practices psychotherapy in the Bay Area, California, where she sees adults and provides consultation and supervision. She is a psychologist, psychotherapist, music therapist, author, singer, and songwriter.Eva Tuschman Leonard, LMFT, is a psychotherapist, writer, and visual artist residing in Northern California. Her first book, Bodywork, is a meditation on illness, grief, and desire told through her drawings and written reflections.

• 1. Scream: Learning from Being Heard 2. Watch: Learning from Time 3. Song: Learning from Singing—Guru Bodhichitta 4. Alchemy of Soul: Learning from Creativity and the Unconscious 5. Others: Learning from Multiple Selves 6. Surrender: Learning from Illness 7. Wanting Out: Learning from Cats—Bardo and the Shoji Screen 8. Circle Game: Learning from Cats—Chief and His Exercise Wheel 9. Devotion: Learning from Nondual Love 10. Departure: Learning from Goodbye 11. Burial: Learning from Death—Île-à-la-Crosse 12. Ascension: Learning from Divinity 13. Grace: Learning from Living—Tara’s Promise 14. Afterword: Sing the Dream that Wakes You Up

'This is an intimate book—intuitive, illuminating, and inspiring. Willow Pearson Trimbach and Eva Tuschman Leonard’s engaged, relational exploration of waking dreams and nighttime dreams in psyche time opens the reader to multiple dimensions of what Bion called emotional truth. Through their dream dialogues, touching longings, realizations, losses, and creative expressions, dreams are held as guides from the mystery of the soul. The offering of these dream dialogues invites you to partner your own dreamlife, as a lifelong path of contact with the depths. Listening for grace is an expressed method of their dream practice, helping the reader to gain psychotherapeutic and spiritual access that honors and opens resonant sources yet unknown. This is a wonderful further exploration into our human experience as feeling and dreaming beings.'Michael Eigen, author of The Challenge of Being Human, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, Psychic Deadness, and The Sensitive Self'This book is a genuinely artistic and inspiring masterpiece—deeply enriching and exceptionally well-written. Chapter by chapter, the authors guide us with creative vision and insight toward the emotional truths of dreams. By inviting the reader into their intimate conversations, they allow qualities of aliveness to emerge, and we are changed by it—both personally and professionally. This captivating work illuminates psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic thinking with brilliance, making it essential reading for anyone interested in exploring dreams as a path to self-inquiry. It also shows how, through engaging with dream dialogues, we come to nest ourselves—and others—more deeply.'Jani Santamaría Linares, PhD, editor of Bion, Dreamwork and the Oneiric Dimensions of the Mind and co-editor of The Bion Seminars at the A-Santamaría Association'Willow and Eva have crafted an insightful, heartfelt, and truly original book that is sure to delight any explorer of the nocturnal mind. Ever since Plato, the power of dialogue has been engaged for transformation. This elegant book is about authentic dialogue—with our deeper self, with each other, and with reality. Rigorous, reflective, and infinitely wise, these gifted guides will take you to the treasures that await you within and show you to share that wealth with the world.'Andrew Holecek, author of Dream Yoga'Through this book, Willow Pearson Trimbach and Eva Tucshman Leonard carve an astonishing new path of dialogue with multiple intuitive perspectives demonstrating their scholarly care and freedom. Dreamwork in this context is the awakening of the dreamer to liberatory emotional truths. They push the insistence on interpretation of dream to a radical turn—a new method of engaged dream practice, arguing for an ecological interconnectedness extending from the hollow of the dream navel to the ever-evolving Anima Mundi. An unanticipated outcome of this work is its silent reparative impulse to heal the history of psychoanalysis by bringing Freudian, Jungian, and mystical traditions closer in “withness” to a common concern—for life, death, or what dreams may come.'Shifa Haq, assistant professor, Ambedkar University Delhi, author of In Search of Return: Mourning the Disappearances in Kashmir'With this compelling new book, Willow Pearson Trimbach and Eva Tuschman Leonard invite you to awaken to the deep mystery of dreaming—at once a dialogical practice embracing the fullness of our being, as well as a path toward the more we have yet to become. Accepting their invitation to “sing your dreams” might just open your soul to growth, grace, and love you didn’t know were waiting for you.'Robin Bagai, PsyD, lecturer and editor of A Michael Eigen Companion: Moments of Wisdom from a Psychoanalytic Mystic'In this deeply touching dialogical work, Willow Pearson Trimbach and Eva Tuschman Leonard re-vision the interpersonal as incubator to our oneiric dimension of being. For these authors, dreams as nested ontology give birth to a third body able to nourish our communal dream-weaving capacities—the psychic tissue needed to “hear” our perennial pre-caesurian and caesurian murmurations, screams, and vanishing points. Read Willow Pearson Trimbach and Eva Tuschman Leonard and welcome your re-“living,” your silent rebirths, and nourish your ordinary waking perception of reality.'Loray Daws, PhD, DPsa, psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, author of Introduction to the Work of Michael Eigen'Luminous and oneiric, The Emotional Truth of Dreams returns dreaming to the heart of psychoanalysis. This book reads like a dream—porous, shimmering, unhurried—its pages opening emotional truth across space and time. With exceptional grace, Willow Pearson Trimbach and Eva Tuschman Leonard sing the dream that awakens and expands the heart-mind. Sublime and enlarging, dreams in these pages represent, connect, and transform.'Shalini Masih, author of Psychoanalytic Conversations with States of Spirit Possession: Beauty in Brokenness'In an era of doom-scrolling social media feeds in order to instantly receive overwhelming artificial information from people we probably won’t ever meet, Willow Pearson Trimbach and Eva Tuschman Leonard offer us a calming, nourishing alternative: to attentively get to know ourselves through intimate psychic dialogue with another human being via the timeless wisdom of dreams. It was a transformative pleasure to accompany them on the co-reverie landscape of their elegant soul-touching text, and discover alongside their generous first-person-voices, the worlds of irreplaceable healing, connection, and understanding that open when we make time for dreaming together.'Adam Shechter, LCSW, author of 'The phantasy of the socialist heart and the uroboros', free associations