Incubating our dreams
Sleep + naps for manifestation hacks
Dear readers,
We are officially in a new season. Whether or not you were aware of the solstice occurring yesterday (December 21st) , I wonder what you were experiencing in both your awake-state and asleep-state?
In the Northern hemisphere, where I am currently located, it was the winter solstice, also the longest night of the year. Starting today, the amount of daylight begins to gradually increase until we reach the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, which occurs between June 20th-22nd.
What is significant about this regarding our dreams? Well, the seeds of intentions we set on the winter solstice is amplified over the course of the winter and spring seasons. You can imagine these intentions being sunbathed by a matter of a few seconds more per day and incrementally reaches up to an average of 3 minutes per day in March, depending on your location in the Northern hemisphere.1 By the time the summer solstice arrives, your intentions may be in full blossom or other ways of being may be emerging! In last week’s post, Stephanie writes beautifully about the solstice practice being a way of remembering.
Chani Nicholas, a counseling astrologer and co-founder of CHANI, shared a social media post yesterday explaining that we can take advantage of these longer nights with quality sleep. She describes sleep as a “manifestation hack” when experiencing a creative block. In fact, there are many historical anecdotes referring to the Eureka moment occurring when one is drifting between awake and sleep state, scientifically known as N1 or hypnagogia.
“Thomas Edison, among others, often took advantage of this state. When struggling with a thorny problem, he would sit down for a nap while holding a metal ball in his hand. Just as he fell asleep, the ball would fall out of his hand and wake him up, and when he woke, he often had a new solution in mind.”2
A recent MIT study found that when a dream was prompted during N1, called “targeted dream incubation,” creativity is particularly fertile. In this study, there were four groups that performed three tasks on the topic of trees.
Group 1: napped for 45 minutes while wearing a device that prompted them to dream about trees
Group 2: napped for 45 minutes while wearing a device that prompted them to observe their thoughts
Group 3: did not nap and were prompted to think about trees
Group 4: did not nap and were prompted to observe their thoughts
Group 1 outperformed all other three groups on the tasks related to trees; 43% more than Group 2 and 78% more than Groups 3 and 4. The results suggested that being in N1 stage of sleep while also having an anchor for dreaming rendered more creativity.
This brings me to a recent conversation I had with my partner. He snoozes his alarm constantly and he swears it’s during those in-between moments of sleeping that his dreams are the most vivid and wild. I was recently subjected to his snooze-button morning-ritual. Lo and behold, I did end up with several reels of vivid dreams with better recall.
There’s something to that sweet spot of drifting between awake and asleep states. And to think I could interject those moments with a prompt or an intention feels like a juicy opportunity for deepening my conversations with the Dreamworld rather than feeling like the dream is revealing something to me or doing something to my psyche.
I imagine the Dreamworld has patiently been waiting for us to recognize our ability to be active participants in dreaming and weaving the wisdom channeled in our sleep-state to our waking-state, to take up our role as the powerful co-creators that we are.
Can you imagine what we might wake up with if we were to incubate our dreams with intentions of co-liberation in its boundlessness?
The curiosity is alight within me…if anyone else should try this, please share what comes up for you.
Here’s to honoring the solstice, napping with intention, snoozing alarms more than once, and incubating our dreams with freedom for all…
In community with our dreams,
minna
https://www.almanac.com/how-much-daylight-do-we-gain-after-winter-solstice#:~:text=By%20the%2020th%20of%20February,it's%2010%20hours%2C%2056%20minutes.&text=By%20the%20time%20we%20get,16%20minutes%20by%20the%20solstice.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/sleep-sweet-spot-dreams-creativity-0515