Dream incubation is a method of accessing deeper levels of consciousness by asking for a question to be answered, a sign to be given, or a spirit to be contacted while you are asleep and dreaming.

Basically you are asking to have a specific dream, the nature of which depends a lot on the nature of your specific concern.

Dream incubation might sound a bit strange or mystical but it isn’t unusual, rare, or new. The Old Testament of the Bible contains many references to dream interpretation and to signs and answers provided by dreams.

The first book written and published by he famous Victorian psychologist Sigmund Freud was entitled, The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud was interested in neurology and planned a career in neuroscience until the University of Vienna excluded him on account of his religion. Freud chose a topic near to the one he really wanted to study, and ended up founding a new discipline.

Many other famous scientists and thinkers, including 20th century mathematician Albert Einstein, have noted that the answers to complex problems frequently seem to come suddenly in dreams after eluding them for long periods during their waking lives. Einstein famously said that he valued creativity over intellect, noting the important role his dreams and intuitive flashes played in his work. 

Asking for an answer to a vexing question in a dream is not at all unusual, and it can be surprisingly effective. It’s a little bit like when you forget where you left your keys, but no matter how hard you try to remember they just seem to get more lost. The minute you quit looking for them, boom! Their exact location pops into your head and you can’t even believe you lost them!

Incubating a dream is a little like that. You ask for the solution to a complex problem in your life that you can’t seem to solve while awake.

Usually you will get an answer, maybe not the first night, maybe not the seventh, but eventually, a dream will come.

When it does, you might be surprised at what you find.

A Personal Example

Dream incubation is especially helpful when it comes to finding the answers to ‘big’ questions about spirituality, life path, vocation, loved ones, and/or personal problems that seem to persist no matter what you do.

For example, since leaving my job in the financial sector in October of 2008, a question that has bothered me a lot in varying degrees is, “Now what?”

For several weeks I worked on incubating a dream that would give me a good answer, or at least a new direction.

When you lose a job that has absorbed lots of your energy for years and years, the process that follows can feel a lot like the stages of grief.

At first I felt stunned to be unemployed at this age, but also relieved to be out of a toxic work environment. For several weeks I didn’t really care what happened next for me, so long as it didn’t involve a headset, a cubicle, a corporation, or a weekly evaluation by a drone supervisor.

To say I was burned out is the understatement of the century. For weeks I walked the dog a lot and wrote tons of articles about how the financial industry is run by evil, greedy jerks. It was good to get all that anger out of my system, and I had plenty of it to get out. (Plus, the financial industry really is run by evil, greedy jerks…but that’s another article.)

Then, once that feeling of relief subsided and I had gotten some much-needed rest and written out the last drop of my pent up rage, I slowly began to feel restless and even depressed. Things looked bad. The job market looked bad. I looked bad. It was hard to summon a positive thought on the subject.

Those feelings gave way to a sense of panic and sporadic attempts to plug something new into the vacuum left by the toxic job. Anything. Maybe I could go back to school (again???), or maybe I could go into the medical field (at 56? How many new medical workers can Michigan really absorb?)

I moved through denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally, acceptance. My job was gone. Another like it wasn’t likely to pop up in this economy and I didn’t want another one like it anyway. I was kind of old to be starting a nursing career and I faint at the sight of blood so probably not a good backup anyhow.

Finally I accepted my situation for what it is. Over. I asked every night before bed for a dream that would show me what work I needed to finish before I die.

That was my dream question: “Now what?”

The Answer

Often when you try to incubate a dream, the answer doesn’t appear instantly. People can go weeks waking up each morning with no memory of a dream at all, much less an answer to whatever question they were asking.

When a dream does come, it often comes in symbolic language or story form. You have to do some deciphering to get to the meaning. You might get only a partial answer, or a strange answer that seems to be the answer to an entirely different question.

Whatever you get, write it down and keep your mind open. Even if the dream doesn’t make immediate sense, there is a good chance that something will click later that will knock you over.

After weeks of asking, “What next?” and “What work is my work?” I had the following dream:

I am in need of a job, and I find myself in a busy restaurant where I recognize one of the head waitresses is a young woman I lived with while I was in college many years ago.

This young woman worked as a cocktail waitress back in those days, and I’m shocked to see that she still waits tables, this time at a busy high-end restaurant. She looks as young and vibrant as when she was in her 20s, and to my surprise she not only remembers me, she gives me a job with barely so much as a word.

I realize that although she is in service to people much wealthier than herself, her position is one of strength, power, and great honor. She is important in a quiet but very powerful way. It is not that the people she serves are less important or less valuable than she is, but rather that being in a service position for many years is a great honor in itself and confers much in the way of influence and respect upon the server.

It is clear to me that this woman was able to give me a job because of the great respect the staff and patrons feel for her. Her position is solid as a rock and she does everything easily, gracefully, and with a quiet dignity.

I, on the other hand, am a bit of a nitwit. I repeatedly oversleep, forget I have the job, show up late and drop things, and so forth. I am assured of keeping the position, and she is patient and unbothered but other people who work there are annoyed with me for being such a ditz. I realize I have got to get it together, focus, and just to what’s in front of me.

No sooner do I make this resolution than the dream shifts and I have been given an important task, but it is one that alarms and frightens me. I am charged with cutting the frozen limbs off certain patrons who wait in line, desperate for this service.

Mostly it is their lower legs and feet that I am charged with sawing off, but sometimes it is their hands. These body parts are literally frozen solid. They cannot feel anything in them.
They know that when I cut them off they will feel pain, but they want this pain. They want it badly. They want to feel something, even if it is pain. They are actually waiting in line in the restaurant for this service.

I save the limbs and they are carefully stored and cared for someplace else. I don’t know what is going to happen to them but I get the sense they are not to be discarded but rather restored and eventually returned. I think that this is a weird job but it is the job I have been given, and I have to just do it.

Weird dream, huh?

So how does this dream answer my question? I’m supposed to go be a waitress and saw people’s legs off? Isn’t that kind of gruesome?

I think the dream was telling me two things:

1.    Service is an honor. To care for others even in the most mundane way and to do this for many years is a privilege. Although in this world service is often degraded, in a higher sense, service is an honorable calling. In a server/served relationship it is the server who holds the greater power and the greater responsibility. The mundane caretaking I do matters.
2.    Part of my work involves helping people to feel again. This work is hard and sometimes distasteful to me but it is as much a service as waiting tables or washing dishes. If it is put in front of me to do, that is what I should do. It doesn’t need to make sense. I don’t need to see the whole picture to do the work.

So there you have it.

Honestly, you do have to have a taste for this sort of thing and I do. I find dreams fascinating, and could write a book on odd dream phenomena.

Have you had a weird dream or gotten an answer to a question in a dream?

Feel free to tell the story in comments if you feel so inclined.