Author

Subject: Dream Incubation Experiment for You

Jane Anderson

17:53 07/11/2000 

One of the suggestions received through our recent survey was that a regular Dream Incubation experiment be offered.

Okay - so here's the first one to see how you go, what you think and so on. This should be a fun one to do.

"Dream Incubation" means going through a process to seek a dream on a certain theme, or to include a certain symbol, or to address a certain issue and so on.

There are many ways to do a dream incubation. (Dream Network members can check on these in both "How To Interpret Your Dreams" and "Sleep On It" which can each be accessed as full texts through the members' library at this site.)

I will suggest one method for you all to use for this experiment, but you can do whatever suits you.

Okay, HERE'S WHAT TO DO:

Aim of Experiment:

To get a yellow flower to appear in one of your dreams and to see how it appears, and how it fits into the story line of your dream. (We will discuss the deeper results after this stage!)

How to do this:

Before falling asleep, visualise a yellow flower and keep repeating to yourself, as you fall asleep, "Tonight there will be a yellow flower in my dream and I will remember the dream and all its details."

Next morning:

Write any dream you have with a yellow flower ... or any dream which seems relevant to the dream incubation to you, or which seems important to register.

Then:

Put your dream and any thoughts or questions you might have as a reply here.

Let's keep this one open until the end of November and then see what conclusions we can draw. Feel free to discuss here throughout November though!

Okay:

Go do it!

Have fun!

Jane Anderson

Angela

04:21 09/11/2000 

Hello!

I tried this last night. I rehearsed and rehearsed the words Jane wrote above, until they sounded like a chant rather than a thought. This is what came:

In the middle of the night I wrote into my dream journal about a simple dream image of an oval bed which was covered entirely by a woman in a huge shimmery red Victorian style dress. The woman was either me or a journalist friend of mine, named Shelley. There was a tiny yellow flower, maybe just bigger than a buttercup, lying on the red fabric. It may have been held in the hand, not sure on that.

But, I'm having difficulty with this, because my dream journal (written in the night) says the yellow flower was there, but my conscious mind says, 'Nah, you're just super-imposing it onto the image.'

Frustration! As I am a testament today to that nasty sibling rivalry ever-present between the conscious and unconscious.

That's my yellow flower. Anyone else?

Angela.

Lara

10:44 10/11/2000 

Hi. I tried this experiment the night before last and the resulting dream involved me wearing a 50s sort of yellow dress (that spun out if you twirled)but no flower. Close though. Then yesterday my sister gave me a card (to congratulate me for something I'd recently achieved) and it had a big yellow flower on it!

Carole

19:13 11/11/2000 

Jane,

I've tried for a few nights, but without success. I did notice, however, on the first night that although my mind was focussing on a yellow flower before I went to sleep, my heart was filled with excitement at the project I'd been working on for my hypnotherapy course. I We had to write a four page metaphor which relates to our partner's 'problem', and my writings involved animals in the jungle. One of these was a lion.

That night, when I slept, a lion padded in and out of my dream.

Which brings me to the point that on the few times I have succeeded on incubating a dream, it was always accompanied by a very strong emotion: a real need to know the answer to such and such question.

Do you think that is what is missing in this experiment - strong emotion?

Carole

shalie21

04:48 15/11/2000 

Perhaps I could put my yellow rose dream here, but I had it before the dream incubation experiment took place. But as soon as I saw this posting I thought of that dream.

Jane Anderson

08:25 15/11/2000 

Hi Angela, Lara, Carole & Shalie21,

Just a mid-way note here, as this thread is open for collecting results till the end of the month.

Great work so far, and interesting to see three completely different experiences.

Carole: strong emotion? An interesting point as our dreams deal with conscious and unconscious conflict as one of their major functions, these conflicts generally pivoting around strong emotions (whether we're conscious of them or not).

However another function of our dreams is to work at integrating our perceptions of life and our daily experiences - to find the right document in the hard drive of the brain, the one with the closest associations, the one that helps us to make sense of the world. In this way we can often dream of the little, perhaps emotion-poor images of the day: the ones which didn't make too much sense or which were presented out of context. So incubating for an out-of-context image can work from this point of view. Maybe a yellow flower wasn't weird enough though!

We could have a huge discussion on this. I've written whole chapters in books on my experience and research in this area. In the mid 1990's my (then) Dream Research Bank (which has now morphed into this web site!) involved many people in dream incubation experiments (as well as other dream experiments). When we've finished this 'yellow flower' experiment I'll post some of the results from those days here.

Angela, Lara and Shalie21 - keep up the good work. It's probably better for me to say no more at this stage, other than to encourage everyone to keep going at this one. Feel free to devise your own methods to get that yellow flower into a dream ... all your results are intriguing, including the methods you develop and find successful.

Jane Anderson

Angela

11:50 16/11/2000 

Hi again.

I'm posting for my friend Laurann who does not have internet access at the moment, but did try this dream experiment last week.

She said she had been envisioning a yellow rose, unable, it seemed, to shift from such a limiting version of the 'yellow flower'. So that was very interesting, after reading Shalie21's posting above.

Laurann's first dream was two nights after the incubation. There was no yellow flower, not even a yellow rose, but because both Lara and I have dreamt of dresses, this seems worth posting.

Laurann was being re-fitted into her champagne coloured (rose?) dress and the stitching was all wrong around the neck. This dress is a cross between 50s and Victorian style! I've seen it.

So...After sharing this dream with me, I got in my car to drive home. I switched on the tape which played the last lines of a song: "...with her champagne eyes..."

I had to post!!

Angela, reporting for Laurann.

Geoffo

14:11 18/11/2000 

I dreamt about travelling in my yellow car (in the direction of an aspect of my personal drama, which I won't relate here). I dreamt of yellow metal because in waking life the yellow flowers I see most are a 6-metre-high bunch of 5 steel sculpture flowers painted yellow near where I work (near Darling Harbour, Sydney). That's my image of 'yellow flower' anyway, not exactly a daffodil, I know...

Lara

23:52 23/11/2000 

I have tried this a couple more times but haven't dreamt of anything that I see as related. The dress thing is really interesting. Something to do with equating flowers with all things feminine? Interesting that the dresses have not been contemporary - they represent eras of more traditional female roles. In my dream, I almost became the flower in the way that I was in the middle of this yellow full skirt that swung out around me. Not sure what it all means, but nice coincidences!

Lara

09:49 07/12/2000 

Hi Jane and interested parties,

Would anyone like to offer some closure on this experiment? Jane, should we start a new one?

Jane Anderson

11:57 07/12/2000 

Hi Lara,

Flying through today, but yes, I will be coming back here to offer my closure, alongside anyone else's too. I promised to post some info from an old experiment and I will look for this and do so. Most probably sometime on Saturday.

And yes, I'll think up a new one!

Jane Anderson

Jane Anderson

19:24 09/12/2000 

Hi Everyone,

Well .. now for some closure:

I had left this symbol vague to see what range of guises it would appear in.

We had: a small flower, dresses (dresses like flowers?), a yellow car ... possibly even a yellow lion.

We also had synchronicities: Lara receiving a card the next day with a yellow flower; all the dresses ....

And we had frustrations that the given symbol was too vague and therefore hard to focus on and incubate.

It seems the easiest thing to create was the colour (yellow), followed by, perhaps, the FEELING of flower (as Lara said, the feminine 50's dresses, the feeling of being, as the wearer of the dress, at the centre of the flower).

We didn't have enough results posted to say anything all-embracing, of course.

In past experiments with dream incubation, picking a vague object became interesting as the object tended to weave its way into the dreams with personal association to each dreamer, either stirring up something from the unconscious associated with the object or becoming incorporated into the dream as a symbol of 'task to do', or 'anxiety over achieving the task' and so on.

Also in past experiments, synchronicity has been common. In fact participants in the past have often been unable to remember a dream incorporating the object but have been surprised by its synchronous appearance in their waking life. For more detail on this, look up Chapter 11, "Hocus Pocus or Just Plain Focus", in my book, "The Shape of Things to Come."

I'm going to post a new task (see latest post in half an hour's time!).

Meanwhile I promised to post here some info from the earlier experiments done in 1995 by members of the Dream Research Bank - the results were then published in our "Dream Net" magazine. Look for these in the next reply box in this thread.

[Both the Dream Research Bank and the Dream Net evolved, in a way, into this web site: Dream Network, also with a membership basis. There's another story there for another time, as the circumstances of the evolution and the 'choice' of name bear more of the hallmark of precognition than a sliding of one format into another.]

Jane Anderson

Jane Anderson

19:57 09/12/2000 

Okay, so finally to close this thread and to rest your eyes from all the bright turquoise colour, here are some extracts from the 1995 results as they were written up in "Dream Net":

# "Dream tasks carried out by Dream Research Bank Network Members during 1994 and 1995 have indicated the success of dream incubation (at least half the participants who attempted to induce a dream to answer a personal question achieved a satisfactory dream 'answer'). A vital part of the trick, though, is to ask a precise question: to know exactly what you are focussing on, and focus on it exclusively as you fall asleep."

# "... As Tara recalls: 'My taste attempt was 'drinking a cappuccino coffee'. Before going to sleep, I had visualised myself sitting in a cafe, drinking a cappuccino with Mel Gibson (I'd seen him on TV that day). Mel entered my dreams, but not the cappuccino or the delicious taste sensation...."

# "Maria tried for a 'painting - a masterpiece'. On her first night, 'We seemed to be travelling and I was very aware of windows and their frames. The bus window was beautifully and elaborately framed...' [...] aware I should be more specific [...] Renoir's 'Gypsy Girl' [....] Maria then dreamed, 'Someone announced "and over there we have one of the great masters", meaning paintings. I thought, 'Oh great, now I'll see the painting I was using for my dream task. I approached it and saw the beautiful elaborate frame, but when I looked directly at it, it was a mirror - I saw my face framed. The background was like a background of a painted portrait and my face wasn't clearly defined."

# "Maya chose 'daffodils', and on her second night, 'I was at the back of an old cottage style house. It had old-fashioned gardens filled with flowers and there were clumps of white daffodils with yellow centres and clumps of King Alfred yellow daffodils. They looked magnificent. There was a special glow around them."

# "Valerie picked 'a rainbow' and on her first night, 'Fireworks! Yes, fireworks were fired outdoors. So beautiful with everyone's response of Awww.. aww... Wow .. Gorgeous. The scene returns indoors with a cake .. A man to my right announces something and with that glitter falls from above. Such magnificent colours: reds, purples, golds, greens, blues! So glimmering, so delicate and fine. My thought was that this was my rainbow: it doesn't have to be in the sky, it's beautiful where it is, how it is! The glitter continued to rain down. It felt wonderful. I felt wonderful."

(End of extracts).

Jane Anderson

PS Although this marks closure of the Dream Forum experiment, feel free to post your responses to any of this.

Jane

Jane Anderson

11:54 10/12/2000 

P.S.

Had to smile this morning when I awoke from a dream after opening a dream door into a garden to see ... an enire garden full of golden daffodils ... without doing a dream incubation.

Jane

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