Professional boundaries in therapy exist for good reason. The therapist holds the container; the patient works within it. What the container is not supposed to do is leak — carry content from one person's inner world into another's sleep. Dr. Sarah Okonkwo has been a therapist for eighteen years. She knows this. Which makes what began happening six weeks into her work with a particular patient very difficult to file away neatly.

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Professional boundaries in therapy exist for good reason. The therapist holds the container; the patient works within it. What the container is not supposed to do is leak — carry content from one person's inner world into another's sleep. Dr. Sarah Okonkwo has been a therapist for eighteen years. She knows this. Which makes what began happening six weeks into her work with a particular patient very difficult to file away neatly.

2026/07/29 Report

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A Therapist Treated a Patient for Recurring Nightmares — Until She Started Having the Same Nightmare Herself

Dr. Sarah Okonkwo is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice in Nairobi, Kenya. She has been practicing for eighteen years, specializing in trauma and anxiety disorders, and maintains the rigorous professional distance that her training and ethics require.

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She began working with a new patient — she refers to him publicly only as M — in September 2022. M presented with chronic insomnia driven by a recurring nightmare that had been disrupting his sleep for approximately eight months.

The nightmare, as M described it in their first three sessions, was consistent in its elements: a long corridor, stone walls, a light source he could never locate, and a door at the far end that he was compelled to walk toward despite a growing certainty that he should not open it.

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