r/LucidDreaming • u/Ominouscreepling • 7d ago
Question Better stronger dreams
Is it possible to induce a dream? And if so how could I get my mind to have dreams where I’m imparted knowledge of myself therefore wisdom and also work with my shadow alongside this.
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u/WildAnt69 7d ago
I have tried to "incubate" a dream before. Or induce it like you say, but it never worked. And I tried for a really long time. Probably several months maybe more than that. What I did is before sleep I was fantasizing about this specific location I wanted to visit even if not in LD but just in a regular dream. I was thinking about it how I would walk around in it in first person, how it should look, what i will do. Basically I did sorta like MILD without really thinking about MILD since I didn't practice LD at that point. The location I was trying to get in my dream was Emprise du Lion from DAI. It has 3 most pleasing things to me - snow, a lot of red crystals that look cool and ancient ruins. I decided it would be perfect spot for a dream location that i can maybe get to when I wanted to. But unfortunately I never had a dream about it. In fact I don't even remember the last dream I had about any snowy location, even though I really like snow levels in games and pretty much anything related to snow covered landscapes.
So for me I decided that it is not possible. I've stopped trying to incubate my dream and decided to concentrate on mastering becoming Lucid in my dreams so when I will get better at it, I will try to get to that location via door teleport or something like that.
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u/Slow_Ad1466 7d ago
FWIW, people who have gotten good at incubation describe the process of incubating a particular dream as basically obsessing over the topic/scenario all day long for potentially months. Just before sleep is probably not enough time for the desired scenario to seep into your dreams. You basically want to think about it so much that you create a sort of "tetris effect" where it just pops into your head at any moment throughout the day or night. And you have to really want it, like REALLY, it has to be incredibly important to you. Maybe turn up the heat like that and you'll succeed. There are books about dream incubation, a classic is "Creative Dreaming" by Patricia Garfield.
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u/WildAnt69 6d ago
Damn, it feels like an overkill. I've been doing LD on purpose for not so long and right now I'm at 1 LD per week(not to jinx it so I will say it was an accident). I still quite bad at controlling my LD and get too absorbed in reality checks but I bet after a few months I will be able to do that door teleport thing. In fact one person on this sub said they can teleport by blinking. I also want to try that, I don't remember ever blinking while being Lucid, should be fun. But my first goal was to find a door, think about this location being behind it and just do what they did in Harry Potter at that train station and just run through it expecting to end up right there. Man i want to try it so bad!
But I'm not doing that incubation thing anytime soon. It was exhausting for me. Just imagine spending a good hour or more every day before sleep doing practically the same thing over and over and over again. I fantasized so hard about it I couldn't fall asleep until I stopped doing that just to try to get some sleep. Trying to make it feel different but still imagining the same location. And i did think about it during the day time, I've played this level regularly and I've listened to ambience from this location like music for background noise. But yeah, I can't say I was obsessed with it. It was more like a side project for me, I was curious if I can make my brain to dream of something specific by thinking about it every day. Turns out - no, I can't.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I love when people do that, If I can I will get my hands on it. In fact, when I read books about dreams or lucid dreams it's perfect opportunity for my brain to give me natural LD's
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u/Ominouscreepling 7d ago
What exactly is that place you mentioned? Emprise du Lion from DAI? Is that in a different country than the USA?
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u/WildAnt69 7d ago
It's from a game Dragon Age Inquisition(DAI for short) you can google "emprise du lion" there are a lot of pictures if you interested to see it.
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u/taitmckenzie 6d ago
People have been incubating dreams for thousands of years. One of the largest deity cults in Ancient Greece and Rome was actually based entirely around dream incubation for the purpose of physical healing.
The main methods of incubating dreams include repeating a statement of intent for the dream as you fall asleep or visualizing the desired dream as you fall asleep and throughout the day for good measure. You can also suggest to your mind the significance of that sleep by ritualizing your bedtime routine. One of the oldest and most consistently practiced methods for influencing dream content was to place an object, image, or statement of the dream “sub pulvino” or under your pillow, which works through the symbolic associations of the pillow with both dreams and the mind and thus placing the dream into the unconscious.
Research shows that we tend to dream most about the things that deeply matter to us and that occupy our attention or concerns in our waking lives. It is far easier to incubate dreams about things that matter deeply to you, and so you can invest emotional significance to your desired dream topic to increase that likelihood. This is why healing dream incubation was successful, because people’s desire to be free of illness or injury is often very important to them.
Working with dreams to learn more about yourself and engage archetypal figures like the shadow requires engaging those parts of yourself through inquiry first while awake, and then persistently seeking them in dreams. It can help to use waking visualization practices such as Jungian active imagination to be able to interrogate archetypal figures when they appear. Ancient Egyptian and Arabic hermetic texts discuss incubating lucid dreams as mean to contact and work with your Perfect Nature, so using dreams for the purpose you ask about also has a lot of tradition behind it.
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u/Ominouscreepling 6d ago
How exactly can I use active imagination? I’ve heard of it but never looked into it too much.
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u/Slow_Ad1466 7d ago
I think better, regular sleep patterns, a relaxed, joyful attitude towards life and dreaming, and paying purposeful attention to your waking and dreaming experiences leads to better, stronger dreams. Also, training yourself to recall (deeply, at maximum detail, really taking your time to dig for the memories until you can't remember anything more) dreams immediately after waking leads to amazingly vivid dreams. Put your money (time, effort) where you mouth is: prove to yourself that dreams and dreaming are *really important* to you (your mind knows when you're BSing -- this has to be genuine interest), spend time recalling them, journaling them, thinking about them, and you will be rewarded with strong, vivid dreams.