Do You Want to Control Your Dreams? An Introduction to Dream Incubation

Dream incubation can be thought of as a kind of homespun psychological hack. It lets you set the theme of a dream and achieve a certain degree of control over it. It’s not only pretty fun, but also genuinely useful. With this technique, we can actively use dreams to solve difficult problems.

Can problems we can’t solve while awake really be solved instead in the muddled world of dreams? They can, actually. There are quite a few examples. The chemist Kekulé dreamed that he saw a snake biting its own tail, and from that he worked out the structure of the benzene ring. The painter Salvador Dalí saw those distorted, exaggerated objects in his dreams and painted them after waking up.

When we dream, the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for logical thinking, isn’t very active. So our thinking becomes loose and jumpy in dreams, and sometimes it’s actually easier to find new ways to solve a problem or new creative inspiration in a dream than when we’re awake.

The problem is that opportunities like this seem to come only when they feel like it. I may desperately want my dream to tell me what to write my dissertation about, but all I dream about for the entire night is going on dates with my dream girl. That makes it impossible to use dreams actively to solve problems.

Dream incubation is exactly the technique for solving this awkward problem. It isn’t like the kind of lucid dreaming shown in Inception, where you can control the details of a dream. But with some simple practice, many people can set a dream’s theme. And that’s already quite useful: as long as the broad content of the dream is related to the problem we want to solve, we may be able to find inspiration for a solution in the dream.

Here are the specific steps for dream incubation:

Step 1: Before going to sleep, visualize the problem you’re waiting to solve

To visualize means turning the problem into a visible image.

If you want to solve an interpersonal problem, spend a few minutes before bed imagining what the person you’re having a conflict with looks like, or imagining the details of a scene in which they’re arguing with you.

If you’re an artist worrying about how to compose a painting, lie in bed and imagine the draft on which you’ve already sketched part of the composition.

If you’re a programmer putting together a complicated string of code, don’t just think about the logic of the code. Picture the computer screen displaying it. Or compare the logic in the code to something concrete—for example, imagine a multilayered nested structure as the ring-within-a-ring in The Promise.

In fact, for better results, it’s best if you can really see these things. Print out a photo of your enemy, the sketch you’re still developing, or a screenshot of your unfinished code, put it on your bedside table, and make staring at it for a while the last thing you do before sleep.

Why go to the trouble of visualizing the problem? Because dreams themselves are highly visual. When we dream, parts of the brain’s visual cortex are even more active than when we’re awake, and the visual information in dreams is extremely vivid. So the images most likely to enter a dream and become dream material are visualized images. The problems most likely to benefit from dreams are likewise the ones that can be solved, or inspire us, through information conveyed in images.

That’s why, even when the problem we want to solve is somewhat abstract, we should still visualize it as much as possible before going to sleep.

In a study by Deirdre Barrett, the Harvard Medical School psychologist who pioneered dream incubation, participants visualized their problems before bed, and within one week, half of them dreamed about scenarios related to the problems they wanted to solve.

Visualize the problem in your mind before bed—that’s how simple the pre-sleep step is.

Step 2: Recall the dream immediately after waking

Next comes the second step: the next morning, don’t rush to get out of bed. The first thing you should do after opening your eyes is lie there and try hard to recall what you dreamed about before waking. Our memories of dreams are extremely fragile. If you get distracted after waking, nearly half the dream’s content disappears immediately. So don’t let anything distract you after opening your eyes; focus on remembering.

If you don’t immediately recall any dream content, that’s okay. Try noticing whether you’re faintly experiencing some emotion. That emotion is usually carried over from the dream you just had. Once you catch hold of it, the details of the dream will often come flooding back.

Step 3: Record the dream

Next comes the third step: once you’ve recalled the dream, quickly pick up your phone, open a recorder, voice memo app, or something similar, and describe and record what happened in the dream. Of course, if you’re an artist who wants to develop a painting in a dream, you’d better keep paper and a pen on your bedside table and sketch the painting you saw in the dream as soon as you wake up. In short, you have to record the dream as quickly as possible, because even after recalling it, dream memories can still disappear very easily.

Step 4: Analyze the dream

The final step is to analyze what the dream’s content suggests about the problem.

How do you analyze it? Actually, if the dream is related to the problem we want to solve, it’s usually easy to understand what it means. In one of Barrett’s studies at Harvard Medical School, for example, one participant was a student trying to decide what kind of career to pursue after graduation. He applied to two graduate programs in clinical psychology, both in his home state of Massachusetts. He also applied to two corporate psychology programs, one in Texas and the other in California. One night after joining the study, he dreamed that he was sitting on a plane flying over a map of the United States. The plane developed engine trouble, and the pilot announced that they needed to find a safe place to land. They were flying over his home state of Massachusetts, and the student suggested that the pilot land there. But the pilot said that landing anywhere in the state would be too dangerous. After waking up, the student realized that he had spent his entire life in Massachusetts, from birth until then, and that it was time for him to leave.

—Of course, that may not have been the 100% correct choice, but the dream gave him an entirely new perspective. Some problems are even simpler. When a painter sees a painting in a dream, they can immediately tell whether it’s a good idea.

That’s the entire dream incubation technique: before bed, visualize the problem; after waking, don’t get distracted—recall the dream, record it, and analyze it. Pretty easy to do.

In Barrett’s experiment, half the participants dreamed about problems related to their questions, and 70% of those people felt that they had found a solution in their dreams. And it wasn’t only their own opinion: an independent panel that knew nothing about the experiment also agreed that the solutions these participants found in their dreams were reasonable. That’s a pretty good result.

Controlling your dreams

Even if dream incubation doesn’t help us solve any practical problems, it’s still a lot of fun. In fact, if all you want is to control the theme of your dream, that’s no problem either. Just complete the first step—visualize what you want to dream about.

Want to get up close and personal with your dream girl in a dream?

Then stare at a photo of her for a few minutes before bed.

Want to fly in a dream?

Just watch a clip of a superhero movie with people flying through the sky and diving through the earth.

That’s the basic idea behind dream incubation.

With this technique, the next time you can’t find a proof for a math problem, can’t decide on a topic for your graduation project, can’t figure out which of two job offers to take, or can’t find inspiration for a novel… try sleeping on it with a little dream incubation, have a dream, and maybe you’ll discover a way to solve the problem in that dream.

References:

1. Jordan Lite. How Can You Control Your Dreams?. How Can You Control Your Dreams?
2. Daniel Lieberman, Michael E. Long. (2021). The Molecule of More. CITIC Press. (Chapter 4: Geniuses and Madmen).