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had begun to concentrate and
meditate on after this
dreamher ideal teaching
job. It is within walking
distance of her home, at a school which is peaceful
and
run by people who
appreciate and encourage
her
innovations. In fact, her new principal
is encouraging
Lyn to finish her Ph.D., so that
she might be able to
administer her innovative programs on a larger basis.
Experiences like
these demonstrate that dream
incubation is a useful skill. It
can be developed with
practice, and it becomes even
more rewarding as one
learns how to use it. All
the dreamers in my project
successfully incubated dreams during at
least 80% of
their attempts. All but one have since reported that their
incubated dreams and the insights
gained from them
have had at least a synchronistic,
if not catalytic or
causal, influence upon change for
the better in their
daily lives. It is interesting to note that the
impact of an
incubated dream was experienced as considerably more
intense than that of most spontaneous dreams.
My research has
pointed out that, when
certain
conditions are met, incubation can be taught quite easily
using the "phrase-focusing" method. First,
the dreamer
must of course have learned to
remember dreams.
Second, one must be willing to
remember them even
when they threaten the present
view of oneself. One
dreamer, who regularly recalled
two or three vivid
dreams daily, often awakened without
any dreams on
mornings after incubations. It is my opinion, which
the
dreamer did not share, that he
was asking questions to
which he was not ready to hear
any answers. All but a
very few of the failures at incubation came on mornings
when no dreams were recalled. Dream
forgetting can
have many causes early morning distractions, fatigue,
etc. But repression may be the most formidable enemy
of dream recall, and so also of incubation.
All of the
experienced and some of the beginning
dream studies in the
project were successful
at
incubation from the start. Those who were new to dream
study and had difficulty recalling their dreams
had first
to establish reliable recall, at which
point they too had
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