The incubant was required to make a present for me. The presentation of this symbolic gift forgave the incubant of any obligation to me, appeased any desire of mine for compensation, and brought our ritual relationship as incubant and therapeutes to a close.

Some Preliminary Observations

Here I will attempt only briefly to describe some general patterns of results so far observed. The observations I will present may be sufficient to suggest the viability of the dream incubation ritual. A more comprehensive presentation must await long-term, follow-up testimonies from the incubants, and a theoretical analysis of the function of dreams and of the process of dream incubation. I suspect that the value of the dreams obtained from incubation comes from some synthetic mixture of the experience of the dream itself, elaborations given to the dream images, meanings perceived through the medium of the dream, and the test piloting of these meanings into daily life. I'll provide three examples of dream incubations to illustrate how these complementary processes have operated apparently to help fulfill the incubant's purpose.

In many incubations, the dream provided an intense emotional catharsis. For example, one man (29 years) was frustrated by a work inhibition which was related to extreme self-criticism. This incubant had a prior dream which graphically portrayed the volcanic intensity of his creative energy, but which also portrayed his father as inhibiting the dreamer with his cynicism about the dreamer's efforts to make use of this creativity. In his incubated dream, he had cathartic exchanges with several important people from his past, including especially his father, from whom he received in the dream the kind of positive emotional support which he claimed had been painfully absent in their relationship. The incubant awoke from the dream crying, but relieved and renewed, feeling a fresh capacity for work. Reliving the emotional exchanges in the dream at various times later encouraged him and supported his work efforts. He also had some subsequent meaningful dialogues with his father, made possible, he felt, because the dream had relieved him from continuing his inappropriate emotional demands upon his father.

In some incubations, the dreams were of value in providing other forms of compensatory experience. For example,  one  young  boy  (14  years),  concerned   with   his