Dream incubation.
Can you order up a dream about a specific person or induce a flying dream or an answer to a question you pose before sleep. Is this possible?
It’s known as Dream Incubation, and I’m going to offer you some practical tips on how to do this before sharing a dream incubation experiment I conducted, many years ago, that yielded some exciting insights into the relationship between dreams, synchronicity, and manifestation.
How does dream incubation work?
The idea is to fall asleep totally focussed on the subject or question you want to dream about. Dreams process your conscious and unconscious recent experiences, and it’s the most recent, most emotionally charged, and most unresolved experiences that tend to take priority.
The more you can make your desired topic rich in emotion and embed it with a question, the more likely you are to succeed in triggering a dream to explore the topic and come up with possible answers.
For example:
- Write down the question you’d like answered. Keep the question short but precise. Imagine some possible answers to the question. Notice any emotions that come up, then get excited, get curious. Close your eyes and, as you fall asleep, repeat the exact question over and over again.
- Have a photo of the person you’d like to dream about, imagine some of the things you’d like to say or do in the dream. Notice any emotions that come up. Focus on one specific thing you’d like to happen, add emotional charge, and keep focussing on the photo in your mind’s eye as you fall asleep.
- Imagine the thing you’d like to do in your dream: flying, for example. Imagine so intensely that you can feel the sensation in your body and imagine the landscape below you as you fly. Notice any emotions that come up. Focus on the flying sensation as you fall asleep.
You may also wish to create an evening ritual leading up to a dream incubation. You might like to infuse your sleeping space with a perfume or essence you only use on dream incubation nights. Or you might like to sleep in a space reserved for such nights: under the stars, or in a different room in your house. You might choose to sleep in different clothes or listen to music you associate with the desired dream or question.
The tricky bit, though, is that the resultant dream may not appear to be about your chosen subject.
It is more likely to address the topic symbolically, so you’ll need to interpret it to find the insight you’re seeking. Keep your dream journal by your bed to capture every dream that you recall on your dream incubation night, even if they seem, at first glance, unrelated to your subject or question. You may not have met the person you wanted to meet in the dream, or you may not have flown, but your dream may have explored your feelings about the person or the deeper reasons behind why you wanted to fly.
You may have more success with incubating answers to specific questions.
One of the functions of dreaming is to problem-solve within the limitations of your mindset. Your dreams on a dream incubation night may have grappled with the question or problem and come up with a range of possible solutions, all drawn from your deeper self or from your unconscious problem-solving abilities. It’s important to remind yourself that dreams don’t give you guidance. Instead they provide insight into your mindset and nudge you toward fresh perspective. Deciding to ‘sleep on it’ generally provides richer potential solutions to a problem than reflecting on the problem while awake. At the same time, dreams can reveal our blocks and blind spots, giving us the material we need to bust through those blocks and see beyond our blind spots to find solutions that evade us while awake.
Here’s where it gets super exciting!
I’ll let this extract from my book, The Shape of Things to Come (first published by Random House in 1998, now available as an ebook), pick up the story:
I asked people to think of an insignificant object and to follow my instructions to induce it to appear in their dreams. The method involved intense focus on the object prior to sleep and was based on the principle that whatever is unresolved as you fall asleep tends to be considered in your dreams. By choosing an insignificant object I was really asking each dreamer to pick something relatively free from meaning or conflict. By the time they had thought about the experiment and focussed on the task at hand, the object was no longer insignificant: it now symbolised the dream task itself.
Tara chose a white glass marble as her object. It appeared in her dream variously as a small white ball, a plastic ball instead of a glass one, four balls, a billiard ball and an egg. At one point in her dream she explained to someone,
“You see, I’ve been trying to find my white marble. The plastic balls, the billiard ball and now this egg show me that the universal powers are getting my message, but somehow I’m not conveying it quite clearly enough.’ Finally her dream presented her with a gold neck chain threaded with a white ball before she flew up to the heavens where “the stars shone brighter than ever and were the size of … my marble!”
Tara interpreted her dream and concluded that she had a tendency to be indecisive and unclear of her goals at times, as well as a bit of a perfectionist, searching for the ultimate perfect white glass marble rather than the near fit alternatives that she had cleverly produced in her dream.
So far, so good. The marble was an introduced conscious thought symbolising ‘dream task’ which had entered the battleground of Tara’s dreams to stir up questions of perfectionism and indecision. A conscious thought, it seemed, had been successfully used to elucidate her unconscious response to task performance.
What I hadn’t anticipated was what followed next. Tara noticed her marble appearing in her outer world as well as in her dreams. Firstly her son chose six story books at the local library.
“I hadn’t noticed what they were until I began reading them to him that night. The first book was called Roger Loses His Marbles, and it told of a pig who spent all day searching for his yellow marbles. Eventually his aunt found them during the night (dream time!) in Roger’s bedroom on the windowsill. On the last page there was a picture of a jar containing over fifty marbles of many colours, with only one white marble amongst them! The next two stories that I chose randomly from the six also referred to marbles, but only fleetingly: a monster with ‘greedy eyes rolling like marbles’ in one book, and a boy playing marbles with a monster in another book.
“A couple of days later I turned my calendar page to February and there was a picture of two marbles above the word February. The picture for that month was of a teddy bear at school surrounded by marbles. Then the next day my husband told me he had an elaborate dream about diving down into water and retrieving my marble from the bottom!”
Tara was experiencing synchronicity because, I assume, focusing her conscious thoughts on ‘dream task’ had challenged her unconscious thoughts on ‘tasks, goals and measures of success’. These unconscious thoughts were challenged to emerge into consciousness heralded by the classic breakthrough sign of synchronicity. Tara’s life became temporarily flooded with marbles because these were the outer world reflections of her inner world symbol for ‘tasks, goals and measures of success’. Significantly they first surfaced as a search for something lost, then progressed through confrontation (monsters) and finally emerged associated with learning and a comforting teddy bear. Her husband’s dream delivered the final symbolism of the marble’s ‘outing’.
Beth’s experience of the dream task was a little different, since she was unable to induce her chosen object, a ‘garden shovel’ into her dreams, at least as far as she could recall them. However, as in Tara’s case, synchronicities followed.
“On the second day I went out to greet my husband as he arrived home and stubbed my toe on a garden shovel which was on the driveway, a most unusual place for our shovel. On the fourth day I took my children down to the beach and was sitting in the shade chatting with my mother when she said, ‘Goodness, would you look at the size of the shovel your son has brought to the beach!’ There he was, digging a hole in the sand with a huge garden shovel. He had stowed it away in the boot of the car without asking me.
“The sixth day saw my father arrive at our house asking me if I had borrowed his shovel because he couldn’t find it anywhere. Then, when I visited my sister-in-law on the eighth day, she produced two tiny plastic spades her ex-husband had given the children and said, ‘Look at these. Aren’t they ridiculous? They might as well be teaspoons. It would take all day to fill a bucket!’
“While the shovel saga continues, my dreams have been digging down deep into my subconscious, presenting to me things that were well and truly buried. So it seems the reverse has happened so far: that my subconscious has taken the symbol in and dug down deep with that old shovel. I find it most interesting, though, that the shovels should be manifesting in my waking life instead of in my dreams. Wow! This has potential – now what else would I like to manifest? But what then would happen to my dream life? If I choose to focus on an open door every night before going to sleep, would new doors open in my waking life?”
Well, would new doors open in her waking life? (And would they open in yours? Continued in The Shape of Things to Come.)
