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the dream, some representative of the spirit world would appear
and bless the young person by revealing the youth's particular gifts
or abilities, and would give instructions in the use of supernatural
aids which might be available to the person in the future. Having
been blessed by the dream, the young adult also would incur the
responsibility of applying the gifts in a prescribed manner for
the benefit of the community, on penalty of contracting an untreatable
illness (13, 29, 34).
The phenomenon of dream incubation raises many fascinating questions and possibilities. Hoping first to observe this phenomenon and then to investigate its implications and potential usefulness, I attempted to reconstruct a ritual of dream incubation in contemporary form. Here I will describe in some detail the procedure I've developed, and briefly report some general aspects of the results observed. This work developed out of my interest in the creative possibilities in remembering dreams (21), and was initially conducted as an experimental ritual in my dream laboratory at Princeton University. The procedure was then expanded to be consistent with healing rituals in general (8, 9, 10, 32), and taken literally out in the field, to A.R.E.'s summer camp. Here a tent (Thermos Pop Tent #8102/28) was erected to serve, in lieu of the laboratory, as the dream sanctuary. Finally, the tent was invited to be erected in a small intentional community, a residential session of Atlantic University, where the incubation ritual found its natural setting. The Incubation RitualAs an initial guiding rationale in the reconstruction, I assumed that an incubation ritual is an externalization of a psychological fact—that is, a projection mirroring a natural inner process of self-regulation, healing, or transformation. In other words, it is as if the incubant were able, by aligning himself or herself with the symbolic structure of the ritual, to allow a certain inner condition to arise which cannot be produced directly. I found as a motif common to many incubation rituals that the incubant went to sleep in a sacred place, and expected a helpful dream from a revered, divine benefactor. I therefore assumed these two focal symbols, the sacred place and the revered benefactor, to be projections of the incubant's own human potentiality (26, 35). As such, these symbols are operative today in some of our feelings and expectations concerning our personal spaces or vacation retreats, if not churches and shrines, and concerning our doctors, psychotherapists, clergy, or gurus. The essence of 10
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