Experiment!
Incubate Your First Dream Tonight.

Have you ever gone to bed with a stubborn problem on your mind and awakened with the solution clearly in mind?

Most people have at least once and felt very lucky.  Did you know that you can learn to sleep on a problem and awaken in the morning with a dream that will contain either the answer to your question or problem or at least with information that will move you toward solving it?

Here from my book, Living Your Dreams, are the simple instructions you can follow to incubate a dream tonight:

1.  Choose the topic you want to dream about.  You might ask for a new idea for a project you are working on at work or at home.  Or you could ask questions like, "How can I improve my relationship with my co-worker, sister, mother?", "What is really going on between my husband and me?", "Why am I so irritable, listless, sad lately?"

Remember that dreams show you what you really think and feel.   They help you recognize patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving that may be helping or hindering you.  And they show you aspects of relationships and situations that you fail to appreciate in waking life.  Don't ask your dreams to be a crystal ball.

2.  Write down on a piece of paper that you keep by your bed the exact incubation question you are posing to yourself tonight.

3.   Repeat that question silently to yourself as you fall asleep.  Every time your mind wanders, return to repeating the question exactly as you wrote it down.  If you skip this step you will greatly reduce your chances of generating a dream on your chosen topic.

4.  Whenever you awake, write down whatever is in your mind.  It may be one fleeting image of an old friend, a song, the tail end of a dream, or just the idea you were asking for.

5.   Interview yourself about your dream without assuming that your incubation succeeded.  Only after you figure out what your dream is about should you ask yourself if it sheds new light on your question.

6.  Your dreams won't tell you what to do. They will, if you know how to interpret them, open your eyes to new information and perspectives that will make such good sense that you will probably ask yourself, "How could I not have seen that before!"

" Let us learn to dream gentlemen, we may then perhaps learn the truth...But let us not publish our dreams before they are approved by the waking, rational mind."
August Kekule
Address made at the Benzol Fest given to honor his benzene theory
Berlin, 1890