Endorsements
“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 Tuschman 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-visions 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
A Wisdom Tapestry of Dreaming, Intimacy, and Spirit
“The Emotional Truth of Dreams: Learning from Dream Dialogues in Psychotherapeutic and Spiritual Practice is a rare and beautiful book — one that moved me at the tender, quiet, subterranean level of my being.
What Willow Pearson Trimach and Eva Tuschman Leonard offer is far more than a contribution to dream studies and depth psychology, though it is certainly that. This book opens a wider understanding of dreaming itself: an expanded sense of nested dreaming, daytime and nighttime dreaming, and the profound terrain of lucid living and dying. Through explorations of synchronicity, love, illness, time, spirituality, and death, the authors invite us into a deeper, more mysterious, and aesthetically attuned dimension of our lives.
What makes this book especially extraordinary is the way it is written. Willow and Eva — psychotherapists, artists, colleagues, and deep soul friends — weave years of intimate dialogue and lived inquiry into the text itself. The result feels like entering an ongoing conversation between two wise and soulful women over tea on a long afternoon. Their reflections unfold with elegance, tenderness, depth, and humanity. Wise teachings — at times serving as nondual pointing-out instructions — are woven throughout the tapestry of the book, yet never feel imposed or abstracted from lived experience.
This is scholarship grounded in theory, yet rooted in life itself: in dreaming, loving, singing, friendship, illness, grief, beauty, cats, and the mysteries of time and psyche. Included among the book’s many gifts is Eva’s courageous exploration of illness as a kind of “beautiful nightmare” — an offering of vulnerability, honesty, and surrender.
Not all substantive books are beautifully written. This one truly is. Deeply personal yet intellectually rigorous, emotionally intimate while spiritually spacious, The Emotional Truth of Dreams: Learning from Dream Dialogues in Psychotherapeutic and Spiritual Practice is a joy to read from beginning to end. Reading this book felt like a blessing.”
Vipassana Esbjörn-Hargens, PhD
Psychologist, Artist, Death Doula
“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
“This book is a love story between Eva and Willow and the mystery of dreams and subtle realms. Their journey is not solely a journey into the unconscious for the sake of manipulating it. They show the reader how the subtle realms can be a portal or gateway to a nondual realization and, simultaneously, an expression of it. Eva and Willow are not just friends and colleagues; they are medicine women, offering "good medicine" for ever-deepening into the embodiment of Life on its terms. They weave in rich teachings about spirituality without being heavy-handed or dogmatic, offering a path of discovery for a worldview that does not bypass the subtle realms. All realms are skillfully transcended and included—and then reborn again. And again.”
Sarah Marshank, MA
Founder and Teacher of ‘Selfistry’