Ofra Eshel's paper discusses the conflict familiar to all analysts over self-exposure and concealment: ‘the wish, on the one hand, to communicate, share and rethink a therapeutic experience that intrigued and puzzled me, and on the other hand the misgivings, the feeling that it is safer to remain silent, to hold back the more personal, private truth’. What follows is a courageous self-disclosure of an extreme experience of an analyst sleeping during treatment, and includes extensive case material of the early years of treatment of a female patient, whom she calls Clari, and whom the author took on reluctantly from another therapist.

Clari described horrific ‘dreams of force’. She would be in familiar surroundings when everything would go dark with an overpowering, sinister feeling of terror. She