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I have had the privilege of being a guest on a wide variety of podcasts over the past few years. We have had many amazing conversations about dreams, nightmares, focusing and cultivating inner life. In this section, I have gathered all the links to my favorites. Enjoy!
In This Body with Ailey Jolie
Join Ailey Jolie and Dr Leslie Ellis, a leading expert in the use of experiential and somatic approaches in psychotherapy, for this episode of In This Body. In this episode, Ailey and Dr Ellis discuss the intricate connections between nightmares, embodiment, and trauma. The conversation covers the significance of nightmares, their impact on mental health, including their link to suicide risk, and ways to therapeutically engage with and heal from recurring nightmares. Dr. Ellis shares insights from her extensive research, her therapeutic methods, and the broader implications of dreams on individual and collective well-being. This episode provides valuable information and practical techniques for anyone interested in understanding and working with both idiopathic and trauma-related nightmares. We hope you enjoy the episode.
Join Ailey Jolie and Dr Leslie Ellis for In This Body's third episode. In this episode, Ailey and Dr Ellis discuss focusing-oriented therapy, the transformative power of dream work, and how dreams serve as profound access points to the unconscious. Dr. Ellis shares her journey from journalism to psychology, her experiences working with trauma, and the importance of embodiment in addressing unfelt experiences. Together they also explore the relationship between dream work and trauma, the often misunderstood nature of nightmares, and their potential for profound healing. We hope you enjoy the episode.
Active Pause
I invited my friend and colleague Leslie Ellis to have a conversation about Active Imagination in therapy and in life.
Dream Treasures with Gregory Rosa
In this episode, Dr. Leslie first talks about recurring dreams and how watching them shift and change over time are excellent markers for progress in a therapeutic setting. She then goes on to describe the influence that the work of philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin had on her life and practice, particularly his book “Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams.”
The Dream Boat Podcast
How can your nightmare be your friend?
Dr Leslie Ellis explains why nightmares might be shouting for your attention, showing what is unmetabolised in your psyche and maybe even telling you what is needed to help that process. “The antidote is often within the dream itself,” she says. She tells us about her embodied dreamwork method for “imagining the dream forward” to discover a new way through the dream, allowing it to complete in a way that doesn’t disturb your sleep.
As part of her mission to de-mystify nightmare treatment and dreamwork in general, Dr Ellis talks to us about her long experience in working with dreams and nightmares, including her doctoral research on treating the trauma-related dreams of refugees. And she shares her knowledge and enthusiasm for the Focusing work of Eugene Gendlin.
For the Dream of the Week, she shares a delightful dream of a red fox that may or may not be as tame as it appears.
Your Brain On
Why do we dream? Is lucid dreaming real? How can dreams be used for therapy? Does cheese really give us nightmares?
In this episode, we discuss the neuroscience and psychology of:
• REM sleep, and how it puts our brain in the ideal state for creating dreams
• Why dreams might be a way for our brains to stop non-visual senses taking over our brains when we sleep
• The links between recurring dreams and trauma, and how external stimuli influence the things we dream about
We talk to teacher and psychotherapist Dr. Leslie Ellis about how she incorporates dreams into therapeutic practices, and discuss why dreaming is so difficult to study.
Plus: we take a trip through time, exploring all the world-changing inventions, discoveries, and works of art that were inspired by dreams.
The Living Process with Greg Madison
In this episode, Leslie and Greg talk about her journey into Focusing after her initial training in Jungian analysis and her training in Trauma-informed FOT with Shirley Turcotte. We speak a bit about trauma and working bodily with trauma events and also working with the dreams that can accompany unprocessed trauma. We spent most of our conversation talking about specific ways of working with dreams experientially, including getting help in the dream, retelling the dream from the inside of the dream, and sensing how the dream could carry itself forward. We also muse a bit about the profound and intriguing nature of dreams and how they extend beyond our way of understanding them.
The Current with Matt Galloway
There is a growing body of research to show that REM sleep — short for Rapid Eye Movement — is critical to our daytime functioning. But are Canadians getting enough of it?
Dreaming The Light
Today, I'm delighted to have Dr. Leslie Ellis join us to discuss her Nightmare Treatment Protocol. Dr. Leslie Ellis, PhD, RCC, is a distinguished registered clinical counselor, educator, and accomplished author. Dr. Ellis is a prominent authority in the field of somatic approaches in psychotherapy, with a specific focus on dreams, nightmares, and trauma.
Throughout our conversation, we will delve deeply into the practical application of her protocol, exploring how it can be effectively utilized in collaboration with a therapist or as a self-help tool for managing nightmares.
The Dream Journal
Nightmares: what’s their cause and cure? Our guest is clinician and dream demystifier, Dr. Leslie Ellis. Nightmares seem to be caused by anything upsetting whether in recent life or from long ago. Luckily, we don’t need to know what is causing a nightmare to work with it. Dreaming helps us metabolize emotions but nightmares can wake us up, interrupting the process.
She describes a dream as a picture of our current or habitual nervous system condition (ala Eugene Gendlin). It can be helpful to rescript the dream or change the ending in an environment where we feel calm and safe. Dr. Ellis describes bias control and aspects of Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory.
The Unveil Podcast
In today’s episode we discuss:
The nature of dreams - what are they, and why do we have them
How to work with and through dreams
How to remember dreams
Jungian dream assessment
The Focusing method and approach for trauma work
Somatic dream work
Tips for people who “don’t dream” - or don’t remember their dreams
Nightmares - what they are and how to work with them
The Raven Magick Podcast
Join Raven Alison and Dr. Leslie Ellis as they explore how Dreams can help aid anyone with Shadow Work. Learn how getting curious and engaging with our Dreams can help us on so many levels, including helping integrate trauma, PTSD, our subconscious thoughts and more!
Dangerous Wisdom
A delicious discussion of the importance of dreams and some of the basics of how to approach them. Dr. Ellis wrote a book called, A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy that provides a highly accessible, yet insightful education on the nature of dreams and how to work with them. By offering a unified model, Dr. Ellis makes it possible for all of us (clinicians and non-clinicians) to begin to understand the importance of dreams, and to begin to work with them so as to receive the profound gifts they can bring to our own life and the life of the world we share.
The Trauma Therapist
Dr. Leslie Ellis is a leading expert in the use of somatic approaches in psychotherapy, in particular for working with dreams, nightmares and the effects of trauma. She is the author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2019) and offers many training opportunities in embodied, experiential dreamwork based on her book.
The Dream Journal
We speak about nightmares and the nervous system using an approach combining polyvagal theory and embodied experiential approaches including Gendlin’s practice of Focusing. She argues that learning to find a sense of safety is not just necessary for treatment to proceed but that the sense of safety is the treatment itself.
Dr. Ellis also speaks about her work on teaching clinicians to welcome their clients’ dreams in therapy including why clinicians are so intimidated by dreams. These simple techniques can also be used when sharing dreams with friends and partners. Such dream-sharing has been shown to increase a sense of intimacy and trust in the relationship.
We end with Leslie helping me to unpack my dream of being a zombie in a compound and seeing a dancing half-mechanical elephant.
The Sleep Whisperer
Can our nightmares teach us something?
How do nightmares relate to sleep?
What is the link between the autonomic nervous system, trauma and nightmares?
Can someone caught in the loop of trauma and nightmares move past them?
How is sleep paralysis different to with nightmares?
What can we do when we have nightmares momentarily and overall?
What do children's nightmares and night terrors mean?
The Dream Journal
We speak about the power of dream shards (aka snippets) and encourage listeners to record even their smallest dreams. We then shift to somatics and the “felt sense” which is the basis for the famous dreamer’s “aha”. We talk about Leslie’s specialty of trauma therapy; what are the hallmarks of PTSD, and how can dreams mark that the condition is waning? We end with a plea for people to get help with their nightmares especially if they are having suicidal thoughts.
The Emergent Human
Dr. Ellis discusses the value of engaging clients in dream work, as it helps point out salient emotional concerns, helps limit biased conscious editing, provides new perspectives on issues, and can serve as a diagnostic tool. Dreams often pick up on things which affect us during the day, even if we are not consciously aware of it. Dr. Ellis details how one could understand key life events through paying attention to trends in dreams and lends theories on how dreams may be predictive of future events. She also discusses indigenous populations’ approaches to dreaming and theories on how the world may be dreaming through us.
Sleep Success
Dr. Leslie Ellis is a world expert in the clinical use of dreams, with a specialty in working with PTSD nightmares. She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and a Masters in Counselling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. In this episode she breaks down the relationship between Dreams and our subconscious and why we maybe experiencing more intense ones during COVID.
Grief Dreams Podcast
In this episode we talk about Dr. Leslie Ellis’ interest in dreams, the benefits of dream work, how dreams reflect waking life, pandemic dreams, grief dreams, possible dreams over the holidays, pet loss, her ambiguous loss with the disappearance of her cat, and the dreams she had of him afterwards.