Creativity and Incubation
Incubation is, most of the time, defined as one of the four proposed stages of creativity, which are preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Incubation is the process of unconscious recombination of thought elements producing creative ideas at a later time.
Incubation is also related to intuition as it is an unconscious process. This incubation process increases the possibility of solving a problem, and is considered an important step for creativity.
Jewish Traditions
In ancient times, people would seek divine or spirit guidance via dreams. The technical term for such divination: induced dream visitations by spirits, angels, demons, the dead, or gods, is incubation. The practice of incubation has a long multi-cultural history. In the Ancient Near East, dream incubation involved a preparatory ritual and sleeping in a place of known numinous power such as a shrine, a temple, nearby a sacred water source.
The most complete description of an incubation ritual appears in I Kings chapter 3, where Solomon goes to a shrine at Gibeon and, after making sacrifices, sleeps there and receives a divine promise concerning his monarchy. There are many variations of this found elsewhere in the Bible. Jacob has an unsolicited dream vision while sleeping on the future location of an Israelite shrine [Beth E] (Gen. 28).
Modern Dream Incubation
As recent as 25 years ago in 1993, Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett conducted research asking college students to incubate answers to real-life homework and other objective problems on which they were working, finding that, in one week’s time, half had dreamed about their topic and a quarter had a dream which provided an answer. Barrett also interviewed modern artists and scientists about their use of their dreams.
Her research concludes that, while anything—math, musical composition, business dilemmas—may get solved during dreaming, the two areas in which they are especially helpful are:
1) anything where vivid visualization contributes to the solution,
2) any problem where the solution lies in thinking outside the box—i.e. where the person is stuck because the conventional wisdom on how to approach the problem is wrong.
Even if you are not a good dreamer, many have experienced that leaving a problem for a period of time and then finding that the difficulty had evaporated on returning to the problem. Also, the solution “comes out of the blue” when thinking about something else, is widespread. Doing nothing often helps more than doing hard, but only when you have a subject problem to solve. Incubation is the wisdom passed on to us from ancient times.