Living Your Dreams: The Classic Bestseller on becoming Your Own Dream Expert

This is my first book, first published in 1980, and revised twice after for new editions over 30 years. This is my favorite cover from the last edition. Here I focused on the use of dreams to solve problems and generate ideas using my Phrase-focusing Dream Incubation or pre-sleep suggestion for problem-solving in sleep. After Dr. Loma Flowers, MD read the book, she suggested we start a dream training center (The Delaney & Flowers Dream and Consultation Center in San Francisco) and thus began the happiest and most fruitful collaboration of my career.

Almost all ancient and medieval dream incubation centered on religious ritual and the Priests and Priestesses who controlled the rituals. I think that letting so called “wise ones” direct your dream life and try to convince you of the necessity of their rituals and dogmas, results in turning the dreamers, and followers into naïve, children who renounce their personal rights and abilities to find their own meaning in life, free of feeling they must be obedient to a superior force of reputed “wisdom.”

I wanted to create a modern, secular, do-it-yourself method of using pre-sleep suggestion to target your dreaming mind with the intention to SLEEP ON IT to discover a solution or gain insight into the dynamics of a current problem or creative challenge. All the dreams I tell in this book are real, none are made up. You can try to incubate a dream tonight, without any clerics, gurus, or know-it-all leaders.

Of course, if your dream is not a simple easy-to-interpret one, Rather one full of particular, private metaphors, it would help to learn how to interview yourself about the dream BEFORE you decide whether or not you were successful on your first try at incubation so that you don’t toss your responsive dream that might be talking to you in metaphors that you do not yet recognize. This book will get you started with my method of interpretation (DIM) that is also designed to free you from the shackles of fixed dogmas and interpretations from people who do not know you from the inside!

Here is a footnote that might be of interest to you:
I was a senior in college in 1971 when I created a non-denominational, secular, DIY, at home, dream Incubation technique that I called Phrase Focusing Dream Incubation about which I wrote in my doctoral dissertation, in 1976-7. The method was very effective, working almost every time I or my friend tried it if we asked questions of current concern and did not ask general huge questions such as, “What shall I do with my life? Or make a request for future knowledge.

I introduced incubation and my method to my boyfriend, Henry Reed who was teaching in the Psychology Department.

I don’t recall that Henry did any dream incubation in the year we lived together. We went our separate ways after a 1972 Fall semester in Zurich where we attended the C.G. Jung Institute for lectures as we went to therapy to earn our 100 hours in order to enter the Jungian training system. That was in 1972. I stayed on in Zurich when Henry back to Princeton to teach for the Spring semester. We lost touch over the next five years.
Henry left Princeton and moved to Virginia Beach connected to the Edgar Caycee Foundation/Center.

Henry apparently developed a very GURU-centered practice of Dream Incubation in which he was the guru with a sacred place for dreamers to come to perform rituals and incubate dreams. While I suspect that some or many of his clients got some good out of the rituals, he was not forwarding the independence and resourcefulness I like to encourage in my clients. His sacred incubation practice appalled me because it is the opposite of my goals—to leave the power with the dreamer, and to have no gurus in sight. In the first, or one the first issues of Henry’s Sundance Dream Journal, published around 1977, I was shocked to read in his journal, his words that he had taught incubation to Gayle Delaney!

Too many women in the history of discovery and innovation have just rolled over and been polite and modest when their colleagues claimed their innovations as their own, so I telephoned Henry and refreshed his memory! He sheepishly promised to write a correction in the following, I think, the second issue of the journal. And he did, very nicely. I have lost my copies of the journal, but I imagine the Edgar Cayce Foundation has those. I write this here because that myth is being handed down even this year and remains un-corrected since Henry died in this last year, and the author I contacted, who wrote an obituary for Henry and who told me she had no personal knowledge of the matter, declined to correct. I want to encourage women to stand up to such tiny thefts that thrive on the common female reticence and overdose of politeness.

Now you know the REST of the story!

May you find fruitful insight in your dream incubations!