had begun to concentrate and meditate on after this
dream—her ideal teaching job. It is within walking
distance of her home, at a school which is peaceful and
run by people who appreciate and encourage her
innovations. In fact, her new principal is encouraging
Lyn to finish her Ph.D., so that she might be able to
administer her innovative programs on a larger basis.
      Experiences like these demonstrate that dream
incubation is a useful skill. It can be developed with
practice, and it becomes even more rewarding as one
learns how to use it. All the dreamers in my project
successfully incubated dreams during at least 80% of
their attempts. All but one have since reported that their
incubated dreams and the insights gained from them
have had at least a synchronistic, if not catalytic or
causal, influence upon change for the better in their daily
lives. It is interesting to note that the impact of an
incubated dream was experienced as considerably more
intense than that of most spontaneous dreams.
      My research has pointed out that, when certain
conditions are met, incubation can be taught quite easily
using the "phrase-focusing" method. First, the dreamer
must of course have learned to remember dreams.
Second, one must be milling to remember them even
when they threaten the present view of oneself. One
dreamer, who regularly recalled two or three vivid
dreams daily, often awakened without any dreams on
mornings after incubations. It is my opinion, which the
dreamer did not share, that he was asking questions to
which he was not ready to hear any answers. All but a
very few of the failures at incubation came on mornings
when no dreams were recalled. Dream forgetting can
have many causes— early morning distractions, fatigue,
etc. But repression may be the most formidable enemy of
dream recall, and so also of incubation.
      All of the experienced and some of the beginning
dream studiers in the project were successful at
incubation from the start. Those who were new to dream
study and had difficulty recalling their dreams had first
to establish reliable recall, at which point they too had

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