The Dream That Kept Flooding Her
How re-entering the dream can help stop the nightmare
Anna is back in her childhood home, in her tiny upstairs bedroom. The room is strangely unchanged from when she was a little girl, the bed littered with stuffed animals. The sound of rushing water from outside fills the room. She knows, without knowing how, that the water outside is rising, the ocean threatening to overwhelm the house. A small trickle has started flowing down the hall and is now inching its way up the walls… She wakes up from this dream, her heart racing, her pillow damp. This dream again, with flooding everywhere that leaves her with a heavy feeling she can’t shake off.
Nightmares that repeat are insistent messengers, and Anna decides, at last, to turn towards this dream in her therapy session. At my invitation, she steps back into the dream while fully awake, sensing into her dream-world surroundings with open curiosity. Eyes closed, body relaxed, she imagines herself back in her old room watching the water rise. She pauses, taking some time to notice the details around her. She picks up a stuffie from the bed, a favorite polar bear she thought was long gone. Finding him and holding him lends her strength; she can feel how he was a comfort to her during lonely times. In the dream, his presence is very much alive, both soft and powerful.
Feeling into the comfort of the bear, she finds a solidness, a sense of reliability… so needed at the time, she says. Then there is a window that wasn’t there before, and Anna opens it. The water begins to drain all around her, as though someone pulled a giant plug on the bathtub of ocean. She feels deep sadness pass through her body, but this time, it doesn’t stay with her. As the water drains, and her tears fall, the dim light brightens, and the mood of both dream and dreamer begin to lift. Although we could talk about what the flooding might mean – overwhelming emotion from childhood and such – this feels unnecessary. Allowing the dream to carry her through the full experience of it is what brings in the light. And the dream never returns.
What Anna did is known as dream re-entry or dream re-living, a process of revisiting a dreamscape while awake to explore, transform, and heal. Though it might sound modern, this practice is ancient and deeply rooted in both indigenous wisdom and contemporary psychology.
What Is Dream Re-entry?
Dream re-entry allows us to engage consciously with dreams, re-entering a vivid inner world and allowing it to unfold further, with our participation. It’s used today in nightmare treatment, trauma recovery, and personal growth. It can also be a gateway to lucid dreaming as it trains the dreamer to exist in a hybrid dream-wake state.
Indigenous traditions from North America to Australia have long practiced dream re-entry. Vision quests, trance rituals, and sacred songlines were all ways of re-entering the dreamspace for guidance or healing. These rituals weren’t symbolic, they were authentic ways to interact with the spirit world. Many traditional cultures view the dreamscape as another version of reality, as real as the waking world, perhaps even more so.
In the 20th century, Carl Jung developed active imagination, encouraging dreamers to dialogue with dream figures and continue dream scenes to discover what the unconscious mind wants to reveal. He was the first to bring dream re-entry into modern psychotherapeutic practice. Today, this practice takes many forms as part of psychotherapy and personal growth, including: nightmare rescripting (used in Imagery Rehearsal Therapy); Embodied Imagination, a Jungian approach developed by Robert Bosnak; and Embodied Experiential Dreamwork, which combines the gentle somatic practice of Focusing with Jungian active imagination.
Anna’s journey through her childhood nightmare is a typical therapeutic form of dream re-entry. What I have found is that when a dreamer is supported to walk through their dreamscapes with calm curiosity and support, the dream itself responds, comes alive and carries the situation forward. It may bring some of the intense emotion carried in the scene, in this case, a well of deep sadness left over from childhood experiences of neglect washed through her. But once the feeling is fully felt, it moves on, recedes, just like the water in the dream.
If you’ve had a dream that lingers, a nightmare that repeats, or a vision that moved you—dream re-entry offers a way to return, listen, and shift the story from within. Often healing begins where the dream left off.
If you are interested in hearing more about how to help with nightmares, sign up for my free online presentation covering the latest in experiential nightmare treatment: https://drleslieellis.com/dream-talks-highlight-new-version-of-a-clinicians-guide-to-dream-therapy/
My new book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Demystifying Dreamwork, provides much more information on embodied experiential dreamwork techniques, not only for clinicians, but also for personal growth and relief from nightmares.