Incubation and Peremptory Ideation: the human’s capacity to create or find safety while innovative and boundary-shattering images and ideas are being explored is evident not only in the use of schemata and sanctuaries, but also in the engagement of a process called Incubation. While we have known for many centuries that new ideas and surprising images often appear when we are taking a bath (or shower), driving to work, or walking our dog, there is increasing evidence that this “bubbling up” and “breaking through” of creative ideas and images is not just one of those psychological fictions that populate our society.
As vividly recounted by the creative artists and scientists in Brewster Ghiselin’s (1961/1985) book concerning The Creative Process, there really is a frequently occurring process called ‘incubation” that produces these remarkable occurrences. Typically, we are struggling with an idea or with the formulation of an image and are locked in a restrictive mindset (called Einstellung) that allows no new thinking. Eventually, we abandon this task and move on to other matters. We now know that this task often is not actually abandoned; rather it is moved to a “back burner” (our nonconscious). Unattended, this abandoned idea or image has the opportunity to wander around and take on different forms. Then, at some point, when we are relaxed (bath or shower) or distracted (dog walking or driving), the evolving idea or image comes to the surface. Voila! The first version of a creative idea or image is present for our review and refinement.
Frequently, we will find that incubation has taken place, at least in part, through the production of dreams. Our unconscious backburners operate not just during our waking hours (possibly being manifest at times in our daydreams or mediations), but also in our transitional periods between wakefulness and sleep (hypnogogic and hypnopompic stages) and, most importantly, in our dreams. The transactional dream themes that I identified in the previous essay (Bergquist, 2026c) might often contribute to this incubation process, as might the introverted, symbol-rich dreams to which I will turn shortly.
As I have in previous essays in this series of dreams, I turn to the provocative theory offered by George Klein (1967) concerning what he labels ‘peremptory ideation.” This is a model of unconscious processes that are moving as an ideational train through our brain, picking up psychic “objects” (images, thoughts, feelings and memories), much as I described with regard to vivid images. An avalanche picks up debris as it courses down a mountainside, while the ideational process picks up these psychic objects as passengers on the train.
There is more to consider. We might find that this ideational train is closely associated with the process of incubation. We push some working idea onto the backburner and wait for it to develop and mature, only to appear later as a well-formed creative product. The initial idea might have “hitched a ride” on the ideational train and benefited from the attraction of many psychic “objects” to the train. If this is indeed what is occurring in our unconscious mind, then we might expect the emerging creative project to be “tainted” by unrelated events, relationships, and ideas that have been pushed onto the back burner.
