A resurgance in dream research is exploring how dreams are a tool for self-discovery.
Michele Spatari / AFP via Getty Images
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Michele Spatari / AFP via Getty Images
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We spend about two hours every night making home movies in our minds. Over a lifetime, that adds up to about seven years of dreaming.
For most of human history, those movies were considered sacred. Many early civilizations believed dreams were messages from the gods. In ancient Greece, people slept in temples hoping a dream would bring guidance or healing.
By the 1970s, scientists took a far less romantic view. A few psychiatrists likened dreams to the brain’s attempt to make sense of random signals, and their theory threw cold water on the idea that dreams were meaningful.
Psychologist Rosalind Cartwright, known to colleagues as the “Queen of Dreams,” pushed back. She believed dreamwork could be a form of therapy and made her case in books including Crisis Dreaming, co-written with Lynne Lamberg and The Twenty-Four Hour Mind. She published many studies from her lab experiments.
Today there’s a resurgence of interest and new research. And one ancient practice is getting a fresh look: dream incubation, planting a question in your mind before sleep in hopes your dreams will offer insights.
It may sound mystical, but there’s research behind it. In a small study from the 1990s an instructor at Harvard Medical School asked college students to focus on a problem at bedtime. About half reported a dream related to it, and many felt the dream contained a solution.
Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano uses the practice with people navigating challenges and midlife transitions. The first step, she says, is asking a good question, and that takes time. “You want to ask a question that could be answered,” Marchiano says. Skip yes-or-no questions. Instead, make it targeted but open-ended. If you’re weighing a job offer, ask, “What would it look like if I took this job?” or “What would it look like if I went on another date with this person?”