The Gift of Dreams
While our culture is indebted to the powerful dreams of scientists and artists alike, those famous dreamers are not the only ones who have been gifted by their dreams. While our dreams don't bestow us with special talent or skills, they often motivate us to make full use of our latent abilities and skills. Indeed, dreams can provide the creative or insightful "aha!" with which all of us can better understand and even solve the problems of life that concern us.
One method to facilitate help from our dreams is a time-honored technique called Dream Incubation—a process that most Mediterranean, Asian and indigenous cultures began practicing more than 3,000 years ago.
To incubate a dream, just focus on an issue or concern in your life with which you have been struggling. Boil down the problem to a single sentence and repeat it as a mantra or prayer until you fall asleep (e.g. "I need help understanding how to proceed with this project..." or "What's the true nature of this relationship with...").
The famous dreamers you read about, all engaged in this process — whether they knew it or not. Each was preoccupied with a problem, sweated over it, failed to arrive at the solution rationally and then dreamed the answer they were seeking. As the author Isaac D’Israeli reminded us, "The act of contemplation creates the thing contemplated."
Actually, we all incubate our dreams — even though we usually do so unconsciously. Whatever is most challenging and urgent in our life today becomes grist for the creative mill of our dream life — thus the popular advice," Why don't you just wait and sleep on it?"
One advantage of conscious dream incubation is that it will focus your dreams on a particular concern among many you may have.In addition, when you awaken with an incubated dream you can assume it relates in some way to your question and that gives you a head start in grasping the dream’s message.
Perhaps as X-Files Detective Mulder once said, dreams may be "… answers to questions we haven't yet figured out how to ask." And certainly the solution we seek does not always come literally or full-blown. Dream "messages" usually are not literal but speak in the language of "metaphor." Fortunately, even when we don’t understand the meaning of every metaphor, incubated dreams routinely leave us with the residue of a strong hunch and thus greater clarity regarding our concern or question.
Your gift can help us produce the entire DREAMTIME series. Learn more by clicking here.