The following hypnosis technique is a process to use before bed to incubate or manifest a dream to help you with an issue that is alive in your daily life. This process is for people who regularly remember their dreams and have at least some basic dream work skills. I recommended working with basic dream work tools listed in my previous article “Dream Work and Hypnosis” to get comfortable with the basics of dream work before using this advanced dream work technique. In using this dream incubation hypnosis, you will need to keep your dream journal by your bedside, as you will be writing down your dreams upon awakening. With practice, this advanced dream work techniques will enhance your self-awareness and support your ability to be more self- actualized in your daily life.
In hypnosis you will meet with your dream weaver and ask for help in manifesting a dream that will bring you teaching or healing in response to your specific concern. To be your own hypnotist or guide, record the following hypnosis script in your own voice. When you read and record this script, make sure that you speak slowly and leave time between each suggestion so you have time to access you inner experience and perceptions. Read the words with a soothing voice, the way you would read to a sleepy child. Listen to your recorded hypnosis process nightly before you go to sleep and you will soften the boundaries between your waking and dreaming consciousness so you will receive information to help you live the dream of your WAKING life with more magic, empowerment and self- awareness.
Introduction to Hypnosis to Incubate a Dream
Use this hypnosis process once you are regularly remembering your dreams. The purpose of this hypnosis to incubate a dream is to ask your dream weaver to bring you a going down a slide dream meaning dream to help you with a question, decision, relationship, concern or issue in your life to which you want to bring understanding, insight and healing. For instance, you might ask for a dream to help you understand and get direction around a life transition, relationship challenge, or you might ask for dreamweaver’s advice on dealing with a health issue. Perhaps you can ask for a dream that will give you inspiration and insight into moving forward with an art project or feeling blocked in some area of your life. Or possibly, you ask for a dream to activate your spiritual growth and awareness. Before you proceed with this hypnosis have a clear focus and request in mind. Write down your focus and request for the dream in your dream journal. Also write down any thoughts you may have about why manifesting this dream will be important and meaningful to you in your life. If you do not receive a dream the first night after doing this hypnosis, then do this process for at least two more nights. The dream may take some time to be incubated before it comes to you.
The hypnosis process that follows programs the subconscious to work with your dreamweaever, or transcendent Self to bring you insights and transformation. Dream manifesting will not necessarily result in a direct answer to a question since dreams are symbolic and are loaded with many possibilities.
After you ask for a gift in a dream and then you have the joy of working with the dream to discover the many possibilities and gifts the dream presents. (My next article will have a process for working with your dream in hypnosis.)
And then, after receiving the wisdom of the dream, you have to opportunity to choose whether to follow any guidance or insight by taking action and living out the healing and teaching of the dream. Do not be over simplistic, or too literal and throw caution out the dream door by saying, ” this dream told me what to do”. Use Dream work as one touchstone in your decision and choice making process.
Self-Hypnosis Script to Incubate a Healing or Teaching Dream
This self-hypnosis is to be used when in bed and you are ready to sleep. If possible, set up your tape, MP3 or CD player to turn off after playing this track so you can move right into sleep.
While lying in bed and ready for sleep, close you eyes. Notice your body. Where in your body are you the most comfortable and relaxed? As you breathe into those comfortable and relaxed areas, imagine the comfort growing and spreading to other areas in your body that want to relax and let go. Imagine the comfort is growing with each in breath and any discomfort and tension moves out the bottoms of your feet as you exhale. Continue to breathe in relaxation and breathe out the rest as you become more and more still. You become more and more relaxed. The space of comfort and relaxation continues to grow and expand throughout your body. You look forward to sleep and to the guidance, inspiration and healing of the dream that awaits you.
While your body continues to soften and relax, your mind becomes more still and focused. You carry your dream journal with you as you imagine walking on a gentle sloping path down a hillside. The path winds easily through a forest. With each step along the path you take in the beautiful surroundings and move deeper and deeper with in. Your senses come alive as you walk. Look at the colors and textures of nature. Feel the stability of the earth beneath your feet. Hear the sounds of the forest around you. As the light of the late afternoon sun glows through the trees and ferns, you enjoy many shades of fresh green and rich-colored earth tones. Breath in the moist fresh air… and as the sun sets, you feel the cooling temperature on your face and arms. You barely hear your footsteps as you walk on the moss-covered path. After walking for some time, you see a small structure through the trees. You are intrigued to discover a dwelling so deep in the forest. As you approach the structure, you have discovered what feels like a very special and sacred place.The structure is a small temple. As you enter the walkway to the door, there is a carved wooden sign that reads: Welcome to Dreamtime. Your dreamer weaver awaits your arrival. As you enter, you will be between the worlds of wakefulness and sleep and you are able to communicate with the part of you that orchestrates your dreams.
Tingling with excitement and anticipation, you approach the tall, wooden door. You release the latch, open the door, and step inside. What a wondrous place. Hundreds of twinkling candle flames illuminate the room. In the center of the room is a smiling presence that emanates love and good will. You approach the figure and discover someone who seems very familiar to you. You meet the part of you that creates your dreams, your dream weaver. In this meeting your dream weaver and conscious self learn to communicate, to build trust and an on-going relationship to enhance your dream life and your ability to incubate and remember your dreams. Your dream weaver welcomes you and invites you to look around the room. Your eyes have grown accustom to the candlelight and you are able to see many doorways along the walls. Your dream weaver communicates that each doorway leads to a specific kind of dream. Each door has a symbol, word or picture that represents the kind of dreams to which the door leads. For example, one door leads to dreams that are connected to your growing up and childhood events that want healing and resolve, while another doorway leads to dreams about past lives. The next doorway leads to dreams that connect you to people and animals who have died and wish to communicate with you, and another door leads to problem-solving and life direction dreams.
You will spend one third of your life asleep and much of your time asleep will be spent dreaming. Do you yearn to have more access to remembering and understanding your dreams? Do you want tools to enhance your ability to work with your dreams to understand their meanings and messages? Working with your dreams can be fascinating, healing and enlightening and having the tool of self-hypnosis or hypnotherapy can open the door for remembering and working with your dreams. Once you are remembering your dreams you will discover that there are a variety of types of dreams and each dream has several levels of meaning.
Types of Dreams
Some are related to your daily life. A dream can relate to events or situations that are a part of your normal activities. These dreams often have familiar people, environments and memories from your past or present life circumstances. These dreams may support dealing with the anxieties of your life or help with problem solving about things you are consciously or unconsciously worrying about in your waking life. Dreaming about past events will likely be connected to things that are needing attention and healing from that period of your life. In these daily life types of dreams, we are trying to process or organize what happened or will happen and they often give us creative approaches or solutions to problems.
Recurring dreams are the psyche’s way to really get our attention. In my experience, a recurring dream will usually stop once the dreamer has taken the time to work with the dream and get the messages the dream offers. Also, in this category is what is called a serial dream. These are dreams that have the same theme, characters or feelings that have continuity and seem to evolve from dream to dream. These are like sequential chapters in a book. Serial dreams will often be bookmarks for the dreamer to understand her own growth and evolutionary process.
Nightmares are potent dreams that also have the effect of getting the dreamer’s attention. Most dreamers who have nightmares usually awaken from the dream so they are sure to remember it. When the dreamer works with the nightmare and understands the important messages the dream offers, the fear generated from the nightmare can be transformed into wisdom and healing. What appears to be the “boogeyman” in the dream can be an inner helper who “wakes up” the dreamer to something that is important and needs attention.
Some dreams are spiritual or other dimensional. Dreamers have these when they have a premonition, share a visitation with a person who has just died that the dreamer didn’t consciously know is dead, or have dreams that bring guides or spiritual messages to consciousness. Also, in this category of dreams are dreams that may be past life memories. These dreams often leave the dreamer with a feeling of really having “been there”; a feeling that the dream is more real than life.
Another type is a lucid dream. In these is aware that she is dreaming and is able to direct the dream consciously for a positive outcome and dream experience. Lucid dreams are empowering and teach people how to bring the sense of empowerment into their daily lives.
· All dreams are for teaching you something that you don’t already know.
· All dreams may have many levels of meaning for the dreamer.
· All aspects of the dream are parts of the dreamer as well as representing aspects of daily life in the past, present or future, Aspect of dreams can also be in the form of metaphors and archetypes.
· The dreamer is the only person who can know for sure what the message and healing of the dream is. When someone offers an interpretation of a dream for someone else’s dream, she needs to own that she is interpreting the dream as if it were her own.
· Using dream dictionaries or symbol books for understanding dreams may be helpful, but the dreamer’s symbols are related more to her own psyche’s template than just to archetypal interpretations. Symbols in the dream may have common meanings but those meanings may not fit the dreamer’s experience of the symbols in the dream. And because symbols have different meanings in different cultures, the standard cultural meaning may not fit for every dream.
Q: Laurie, talk to us about the importance of making dreams as significant to us as the events in our waking lives.
A: Well, I don’t know if I would really agree with that. I think there are certain experiences that we can have while we are in dream state that are true experiences, and some of them are even mystical experiences – but I wouldn’t say that is true of all our dream-state experience.
Some dreams are more than ordinary dreams. And these I would say can be as, or even more valuable than our ordinary waking state experience.
What I would call ordinary or psychological dreams are more personal, individual experience. We are normally not in a shared consciousness for our dreams. Waking state consciousness is a shared experience – & for that reason, in my view, more valuable than an ordinary dream. This shared, material reality that we live in is given to us by the Divine – that is why we all perceive the same world around us. And this shared reality follows certain laws – for instance the sun rises & sets. Trees do not stand on one corner today and then move a few blocks north overnight. In our psychological dreams – our reality is personal, our own.
Basically: I think there are what I would call ordinary, psychological dreams, and then there are other experiences that we can have when asleep. In these times we can actually go to another realm or go to other places on this earth without our physical bodies being present. Saint Padre Pio would probably call it an extension of mind. I think many people have these experiences, they just are not aware of it. They think they had an ordinary run-of-the-mill, what I would call an ordinary psychological dream. But what might have happened, is that they actually went to another place on earth while in dream state. And if they ever later visit that town or building or street while in waking state reality, they will recognize the people and the buildings and streets and so on.
There are other experiences we can have while in this special consciousness when we are asleep. We can have visits from higher beings, divine beings, or people that we love that have died and left the earth. And these, in my mind, and in my experience, are true meetings.
There are certain qualities to these true experiences that we can have while in dream state, that seem to be true for everyone and for every experience. Many people have come to me with what they think are nightmares, and in my opinion they were actual visits to a lower realm. Others have had dreams in which someone they love who had died appeared to them in a dream and it comforted them. From how they described their dream, it was clear to me that they actually did meet with that person, it was not an ordinary dream. I tell people: If you are not clairvoyant, your loved ones who are now in other realms might visit you when you are in dream state. In my experience, some of those “dreams” feel more real than our experiences in waking state.