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I have been reading a bit about it and the advice is all really obvious: Think about your dream, repeat that you will have it, engage all your senses *describes how to engage senses*. But everyone already knows this. So my purpose here is to talk about some less obvious things, which are probably out there so I'll think about this a little and maybe look around some more and perhaps together we can create a very valuable collection of insights.
Some things about which we can think:
- How specific are your intentions/imaginings? Is it enough to say "I want to have adventurous dreams" a few times and think about adventure, fun and excitement in an abstract and general way? (I did this yesterday and I don't remember the dreams anymore but I woke up feeling happy that it worked)
- How about writing stuff down? I have never written any stories or thought about creating a fictional environment but I can imagine that a simpler, less elaborate version of what a writer does can be used for dream incubation. Creating revisitable (or permanent) dream worlds comes to mind but there is already a lot of very valuable information about that from amazing lucid dreamers and now I realize that I should look there for tips about dream incubation and I'll do this tomorrow and later today (though on my old nokia rather than this laptop and the nokia is unable to show many websites :cackle:)
Dreaming about a specific game:
Let's say you want to enter an RPG game. Do you listen to/think about soundtracks, do you relive your favorite parts of the game, do you imagine being a character in the game and doing some cool stuff that a character might do in that world (but not something that happens in the game)?
And I think that maybe there are no brilliant insights to be had and there is only getting good at imagining and immersing yourself in the imagination, getting into the groove (in whatever way works for you). I have to go now and I hope that tomorrow I can produce something more valuable. Remember friends, as a wise man once said, A great journey begins with but a single step.
I think if you want to incubate a dream you have to look at your own dreams. You should notice how certain things from your waking life infiltrate your dreams. Do certain people show up in your dreams when you talk to them? Do emotional events from waking life occur in your dreams? You should try to really notice why certain things happen in dreams. Then you can try to add these in your visualization to give it higher chance to become a dream. At least that's what I have to say. :)
I think involving emotions is probably useful, though I will add that I am not much of a dream incubator. I remember Dreamer talking about using emotions as a method to attain lucidity, and I know that in my own dream life events that are linked with strong emotions tend to show up in my dreams from time to time. Honestly, if someone found a reliable way to influence the content of dreams I would find that very interesting. So far, I really haven't managed to incubate any dreams on purpose. I haven't tried very much either, though, so.... :)
The most important thing to you while falling asleep should be topic of your dream incubation. So, you should satisfy needs more important than dream incubation. Here's a hierarchy of needs. The needs on the bottom are more important than ones the top.
http://steveroesler.typepad.com/.a/6...79b9b12970c-pi
Dream incubation as a need is a creative activity. Notice the need of accomplishment is be more important than the need of creative activity? The need to prove to yourself that you can incubate dreams could be more important to you than the dream you want to incubate, so you shouldn't pressure yourself or stress over whether or not you achieve your desired dream. Try to remain worthy of being able to incubate the dream you want.
Also keep track of the thoughts and dreams you're having, because they can reveal needs and things that might be more important to you than the topic of your desired dream.
So I have some stuff now..
The general idea:
I am going to try to make my dreams have a theme (adventure and friendship) rather than trying to become better at making myself have a dream about a specific person, place or event. For that, I think writing fiction is excellent. In order to dream about something, I need to be able to vividly imagine something and immerse myself in the thing I'm imagining. And I find it difficult to go off and imagine a cool story or place right away, I need to do it slowly and add elements and come up with ideas and write them down bit by bit. So my idea is to write little stories that I think would be fun to dream about so I can imagine it and fantasize about it when I go to sleep: a dragon, a story/event, a place, characters, whatever (and combinations thereof). And then I will repeat a few times "I want to dream about this" or "I want to dream about adventure" and I hope this will make my dreams super cool and fun!
Next time I'll elaborate and talk about which elements of novel-writing are relevant for this endeavor and which aren't and maybe some other things as well. For those who are intrigued by this and are excited to see what I come up with and how effective it will be, I am sorry that I am so slow and lazy :P