The practice of dream incubation entails engaging the dreaming mind to help address personal or intellectual questions, encourage healing, or to enliven intuition and boost creativity. The origins of modern medicine include dream incubation. In ancient Greece, pilgrims seeking cures for various ailments flocked to temples dedicated to the god Aesclepius, where priests employed many methods including interpreting dreams that resulted from dream incubation.

We've all been visited by the spirit of creativity. A flash of inspiration causes you to compose a new song, paint trailing vines on the kitchen furniture, or write an article that eloquently expresses some of the ideas that float through your imagination. It's a marvelous feeling when the muses of creativity grant you their gifts. But sometimes you have to work to seek inspiration and try to harness your creative power. Difficult though that often proves, you can use liminal dreaming to woo your muse.

What do you do when the weekend rolls around? For many people it's time to open a bottle of wine, smoke some pot, or even swallow something stronger for a deeper journey. Tweaking consciousness is hard-wired into the human experience. Little kids roll down hills and spin in circles. Adults take intoxicants to achieve altered states. We love to leave the everyday behind and experience ourselves in new ways. The impulse is natural, but many of us worry about the long-term adverse health effects, as well as next-day hangovers. But you don't have to ingest poisons to play with your mind. Next time you have the urge to experiment with your consciousness, consider the original altered mind adventure: the dream. And if part of the fun involves taking substances to see how they affect you, try an oneirogen.

We have a smorgasbord of substances, technologies, and practices that can aid in our pursuit to play with our minds. And yet many ignore one of the best playgrounds we have: dreams. Dreaming is the original nonordinary mind state. It's also the one most universally experienced. Most of us visit bizarre, visionary worlds during the one-third of our lives that we spend asleep.

The complex belief system of Australia's aboriginal people is based on the fact that the world was formed in the dreams of the the Creator. Every feature of the earth, they believe, exists in both realms — in a place called "The Dreamtime." Only by looking at the realms together can someone fully understand their ancestry and place in the world. The dream of the creator is an ongoing mythic reality that's overlaid onto features of the earth and points the way to cultural touchpoints and truths embedded in the land. For aborigines, dreams and reality are one.

To dream is to enter into a different world, and there are several different portals that lead to various versions of the terrain. One of the lesser known is liminal dreaming. It exists in a hazy, transitional state that we all experience at some point. Harnessed correctly, it has the potential to yield solutions to complex problems and provide intense kaleidoscopic visions.