married. "Oh, and Lord," I added, "would you mind
throwing a wedding dress somewhere into the dream so
that I'll know what the dream is about, no matter how
strange the imagery seems?" Well, I had great success
with this first incubation and with the next two, which
were aimed at further clarifying the same issue. The re-
sulting dreams were extraordinarily helpful regarding
the marriage issue, and they initiated me into a study of
dream incubation that has occupied me ever since.
     As I continued my personal experiments with
incubation, I learned that it was unnecessary to request
landmark imagery in the dream (such as a wedding
dress) because the dreams were quite easily recogniz-
able responses to my incubation petitions. As dream
incubation became easy for me, I began to try to teach it
to fellow dreamers. But alas! I found that simply telling
someone to ask for a dream in a prayer, or, as many
psychics and researchers instruct, simply to suggest to
yourself that you will have the desired dream, didn't
often work. I then concentrated on defining a simple, but
explicit, technique for incubation.
     Teaching classes in dream study, I worked with my
students to develop as specific and simple an incubation
procedure as possible that would be: (1) brief, (2) easy to
follow at home, alone, even by people new to dream
study, (3) consistently productive of "successfully"
incubated dreams which deal with the incubation issue,
and (4) easy, enjoyable and rewarding enough to
encourage the dreamer to use incubation often, as one
might use any prized skill. In other words, my goal was
to provide dreamers with a technique that would render
them more self-sufficient in their study of their fullest
selfhood. One of the most fascinating ways to tap the
reserves of the "higher" self is the incubation of dreams.
     From my study of Cayce, Seth and others, I was
convinced that suggestion is the key factor in the
incubation of dreams. But exactly how to set up the
suggestion so that it could easily be taught required
some experimentation. With this goal in mind, I
conducted a research project for my master's thesis in

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