Life can be a bit Godzilla

A Hit of Hope

Are you familiar with the phrase dream incubation? I hadn’t heard it until recently, and I was immediately intrigued. How, exactly, does one incubate a dream? The OED says that to incubate means “To sit upon (eggs) in order to hatch them.”

Sit on our dreams? That feels like the opposite of what we should be doing.

And yet incubation—a prolonged, intentional stillness meant to create the ideal conditions for a particular, favorable result—works wonders for birds, so why not for dreams?

While this kind of sitting might seem passive (and therefore a challenge for those of us who always need to be doing something), it actually provides two key ingredients for our dreams: energy and protection.

To sit in this case means to bring energy to the dream—like the warmth that a mother bird brings to her unhatched eggs. In yoga, this is called tapas. The idea is that if you want something to change, you have to bring some heat to it. You bring the body a good fire to create change.

In yoga and with dreams, it’s best if the heat is a steady one. If you don’t have enough or only intermittent heat, the unhatched thing will grow cold and die.

If you add too much heat, you sizzle the egg—just like those old commercials that warned us, “This is your brain on drugs.” You want to get the energy just right, to keep the dream alive so it can hatch, get stronger and bigger, and finally grow into the winged thing, ready to soar in the wide open world.

Something else that sitting does—it protects the fragile thing. This means that you work to keep your dream safe and whole, so it can turn into something more beautiful than you could have ever imagined.

Since life can be a bit Godzilla, crushing our dreams right and left, we need to protect them, fighting off those things that want to smash our dreams to bits. These might be external foes, or wily internal ones. It might be the voice that asks, “Who do you think you are?” Or the one that tells you all the reasons you can’t.

Listen. Whoever told you “no” doesn’t know what you are capable of.

So, sit upon your dreams in order to hatch them, to protect them. Give them your quiet, sustained energy and your keen awareness. Wait. Wait some more.

Believe that there will come a day when a flood of delight will rush into your body—because it is the day your dream has cracked wide open.

And before long, it will sing. Its amazing, singular song.

Dream big, and live light, y’all.