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Does the idea of asking your brain for a dream on a specific topic seem a little woo-woo to you?

Or just woo-adjacent?

You can put your mind at ease — Research from the fields of neuroscience and psychology repeatedly shows that our dreams reflect the issues we confront in our waking life and that yes, we do have the ability to control our dreams.

Think of it as a request from you to your own mind. You can plant the seed of intention as you drift to sleep, incubate it in your dreams, and see it spring to life come morning

Your dreams are stories your soul uses to communicate with you. In these stories, you’re the hero. Why not be the director of your stories too?

In this article, you’ll learn:

Can I Really Control My Dreams?
Why Should I Try Dream Incubation?
Dream Incubation Can Enlighten Your Brain
Benefits of Dream Incubation
How to Control Your Dreams

Can I Really Control My Dreams?

Yes, you can control your dreams. It’s a thing! And it’s fairly easy to do.

Controlling your dreams, or the psychological term, dream incubation, is a technique of thought targeting so that you’ll dream of a specific topic or problem, and often even find its resolution. For example, your goal could be to tackle an unresolved argument with your significant other, strategize on how to ask your boss for that raise, or decide which career path to take.

In human speak, dream incubation is simply focusing your attention on a specific problem at bedtime to influence your dreams overnight.

Targeting dream content has intrigued people for thousands of years. Almost every ancient culture, dating back to Ancient Egyptians, was hip to it. Today, it’s used by clinicians all over the world as a contemporary treatment for PTSD-related nightmares.

It’s not only possible, it’s powerful.

Why Should I Try Dream Incubation?

Targeted dream control — or dream incubation — allows you to tap into your subconscious and design your dreams. Your dreams are there to serve you, and dream incubation brings that to life.

Did you know you spend approximately one-third of your life sleeping? Given the average life expectancy for U.S. citizens is about 78 years old, you can expect to spend roughly 26 years of your life sleeping.

26 YEARS. Let that sink in.

Wouldn’t you rather spend these years dreaming your way into a new and improved state of mind? While dreams of you flying over the ocean or riding a circus monkey through Times Square are a gas, what if you used your dreams to actively enhance your life?

Ditch passivity and make that 26 years an optimized time of growth!

Think of it this way, sleep is your portal and a grand opportunity for soul-searching investigation. Intentional dream incubation will help you become more self-aware.

Dream incubation is meant to work FOR you. Although some advertisers are attempting to use dream incubation to creep into your dreams. Are there seriously no boundaries?

Controlling your dreams allows you to tap into your suppressed unconscious thoughts and unfinished conscious ones that rise to the surface while you sleep.

Dream Incubation Can Enlighten Your Brain

Dream incubation is best introduced during Hypnagogia. Hypnagogia is the transitional state of consciousness just between wakefulness and sleep (opposite of hypnopompia, which is the transitional state that occurs before you wake up). That’s when your brain is most open to requests.

Let’s talk about your brain parts for a sec and who does what while you sleep.

Your prefrontal cortex (your bean-counting stiff in a suit) is dormant, which is why logic and reasoning aren't there to inhibit creativity and intuition.

Your thalamus relays motor and sensory info (sight, taste, touch, balance — it doesn’t deal with smell) to your cerebral cortex which processes info from short to long-term memory.

During most sleep stages, the thalamus gets still and quiet, letting you tune out the world — thank you dear thalamus.

But things start hopping during REM sleep.

The thalamus is extra active, sending the cortex sounds, images, and other sensations that find their way into our dreams. Your amygdala, your emotions processor, also becomes increasingly active during REM sleep.

Now, let’s talk about what happens when you dream.

When you dream, your right brain, the side related to imagination, is stimulated by dopamine, which can freely create new connections without being held back by other more stable hormones (your logical side).

The result is more flow, cohesiveness, and rapid firing between ideas, promoting more visual, creative, imaginative, and out-of-the-box thinking.

Most dreams occur during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. This is part of the sleep-wake cycle and is controlled by the part of the brain functioning on auto-pilot.

This “auto-pilot” tells you stories in the form of dreams — these stories are representative of what you believe about yourself, others, and your life.

They might seem exaggerated or “over the top”, but that’s precisely their point — to shake you up with BIG, Bold, dramatic messages alerting you to what needs your attention and what to work on.

When you begin to rewire your brain by controlling your dreams, you can change the stories that aren’t serving you. And this can enlighten your mind and brighten your soul.

4 Benefits of Dream Incubation

Designing your dreams to tap into your subconscious enhances your waking life by increasing the intentionality and the quality not only of your dreams but your sleep, too. Dream incubation directs your brain to use your uninhibited, non-judgemental sleep time to create connections that are eluding you while awake.

Here are the top benefits of controlling your dreams:

1. Give Your Creativity a Jolt

When you dream, your subconscious takes center stage. Harnessing the power of targeted dream control as you fall asleep can help unlock the subconscious, where your imagination lets loose and runs wild in search of the true you.

Thinking specifically about the area where you want to get your creative juices flowing directs your brain to explore that area without the reasoning that usually accompanies logical thinking and often kills innovation

Paul McCartney wrote the melody for “Yesterday” in a dream. He spent about a week asking close friends if they’d heard the tune before, thinking he must’ve heard it somewhere before.

Paul vividly remembers that morning: “I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?’ There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, ‘No, I’ve never written like this before.’”

2. Solve a Pesky Problem

In your waking hours, you tend to pressure and overstimulate your brain when trying to solve a problem. Haven’t you had a problem that you keep revisiting in your mind until you’re absolutely sick of it and still have no solution?

Dream incubation points your mind toward your problem as you fall asleep. Taking the pressure off and allowing your mind to do its thing while you dream can bring to light a solution that hadn’t occurred to you before.

“Sleep on it” actually has serious science behind it.

Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, and teacher, discovered the Periodic Table in a dream. He set out to organize and explain the elements and was stuck on how to order the elements.

He made up a set of cards — each card had the element name with its atomic weight and properties. He kept arranging and rearranging them, noticing gaps in the order of atomic mass. Then, one night, he dreamed of a table where all the elements fell into place.

When he woke up, he immediately wrote it down, and boom! We all had to study the Periodic Table in high school chemistry, thanks to Dmitri.

3. Crush That New Skill

Yes, you can learn or hone a skill through dreaming. Visualization is a commonly used tactic in athletes and other high achievers. They picture themselves achieving their goals — how it’ll feel, what sounds they’ll hear, what will it look like?

Those high achievers are priming their brains to achieve that goal. Dream incubation allows you to do the same thing while you sleep. Imagine “practicing” snowboarding in a dream and shredding it up the next day! It’s not a dream.

Dr. Robert Stickgold, Ph.D. is a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and well-known sleep researcher. His work focuses on the relationship between sleep and learning.

Dr. Stickgold conducted a study on insight through dreaming. Participants were shown a series of nine digits and were told to process the list of digits to come up with an answer. There were 2 ways to arrive at the correct answer:

The first was a series of complicated calculations.
The second was a pattern that showed up in the last 3 digits.

The pattern allowed them to get an answer about 80% faster than the first route.

They were shown 100 trials in 1 session as training. Only 10% figured out the pattern during training. Then, they were sent away for 12 hours. At the end of 12 hours, they came back and were shown 200 trials in 1 session.

Group 1 was trained in the morning, then tested 12 hours later in the evening. About 25% of that group discovered the pattern.

Group 2 was trained in the evening, then kept awake all night, and tested 12 hours later in the morning. About 25% of that group discovered the pattern.

Group 3 was trained in the evening, slept on it, then tested 12 hours later in the morning. The result? 2 ½ times more people figured out the pattern!

That’s 65%!

That shows us that our brains learn and solve while we sleep.

4. Say Adiós To Stress & Anxiety

So many of us live with enormous stress and anxiety on the daily, and it’s not good for our health — mental or physical.

Controlling your dreams through dream incubation is an excellent way to intentionally process your unchecked emotions contributing to your daily stress and anxiety. Using that uninhibited dream time to work through issues that your conscious mind doesn’t even want to touch is a powerful method to infuse mindfulness into your life.

A study published in PNAS in 2019 found that when people are stressed, they tend to have more extensive, vivid dreams. And their dreams tend to include more traumatic events (like being chased, trapped, or their teeth falling out).

Incorporating targeted dream incubation into your bedtime routine can relieve stress and anxiety by directing your brain to deal with it in your dreams.

How to Control Your Dreams

Ready to design your dreams and have them serve you? When you begin to do your dream work using targeted dream incubation, you’ll enjoy improved dream quality and more self-awareness.

Intentionality in your life includes stewarding your time and emotions. Intentionality with your dreams involves stewarding your stories and inner experience.

Follow these steps to take control of your dreams :

Once in bed, spend a few minutes thinking about the topic you’d like to dream about.

Phrase your request as a question (“How can I talk to my daughter about her college choice?”) and repeat it aloud a few times along with “I will remember my dreams” once you’re in bed and ready for sleep.
Sleep and dream
Wake up and ask yourself about your dreams before you do anything else.
Record it in your dream journal that you keep by your bed.

Rinse and repeat.

Those 5 steps are the basics of how to control your dreams. But, to get even better results, take a deeper dive:

Actively immerse yourself in your topic of interest through research, journaling, or drawing. (Journaling your feelings about a topic that you need help with gets you in touch with emotions you might not be aware of.)
Seed your dreams around that intention by requesting it aloud. (following step #2 above)
Record your dreams in your dream journal for weeks or months and notice recurring dreams or themes. (Do you regularly dream about being late or unprepared?) **Remember, dreams are symbolic, not literal**
Ask yourself, “How could this shed light on an area of my life?”
Notice when the theme of your intention pops up in your waking life. (If you’d like to reduce stress through dream incubation, pay attention to when you feel higher stress levels when you’re awake.)

The more you practice this, the easier it gets. You’re training your brain to dream per your request and recall it in the morning. It takes a little time, but not as much as you’d think.

Most people will dream of something relevant to the topic within a week, and you have about a 60% chance to dream up the solution to your problem within the week.

We like those odds!

Wakefully is a cutting-edge dream analysis app that allows you to record your dreams right on your phone, set the intention to remember your dreams, and helps you incubate a resolution.

Your AI dream coach will track your dreams for you and point out patterns. Your dream journal stays right on your phone and goes everywhere you do.

That takes your dream journal to a whole new level.

Take Control of Your Dreams

Intentionally directing your dreams through dream incubation is a mindful move of self-care. Taking control of your dreams allows your subconscious to work for you, communicate with you, and help you overcome challenging moments in life.

Part of living an intentional life is harnessing the power that exists within you. Your dreams have power — they can help you get to know yourself and better your waking life.

Why wouldn’t you want to seed those dreams so that they serve you?

Wakefully is a digital dream coach to assist you in making your dreams work for you.

Dream Incubation: The Secret Superpower To Control Your Dreams