Daydream: Neville Goddard’s Technique
What This Technique Is
Daydream is waking, eyes-open imaginal scene. This guide consolidates 14 independently extracted appearances across Neville Goddard’s lectures and books into one authoritative practice page. Repeated variations remain attached to their original sources instead of becoming hundreds of competing pages.
Key Concepts
- Drowsy State
- Imagination
- Subconscious
- Sleep
- Attention Control
- Drowsiness
- Attention
- Four-Dimensional Thinking
- Desire Fulfillment
- Controlled Waking Dream
Neville’s Source-Grounded Explanation
Before falling asleep, enter a drowsy, meditative state and consciously direct your imagination to experience a desired scenario as if you are an active participant, maintaining control over the "dream" narrative.
— Assumptions Harden Into Facts
A 'controlled waking dream' is a technique where, in a relaxed, drowsy state (akin to sleep but with conscious control), one constructs and experiences an imaginary event that implies the fulfillment of a desire. This involves selecting and arranging sensory impressions from the four-dimensional world.
— Remain Faithful To Your Idea
Prayer is a three-step process: 1) Define your objective. 2) Construct a brief, self-predominant imaginary event that implies fulfillment. 3) Immobilize the body, induce a sleepy state, and mentally feel yourself performing the action HERE AND NOW until the sensation of fulfillment dominates.
— Remain Faithful To Your Idea
Bring a desired scene or outcome before your mind's eye (a daydream) and imbue it with such reality and feeling that it eventually objectifies itself and becomes real in your physical world.
— The Most Precious Gift
This technique involves consciously and persistently imagining a desired outcome as if it were already a present reality, often referred to as 'daydreaming with purpose' or 'living in imagination.' The inner vision, when faithfully maintained, will then manifest in the physical world, sometimes in a chronological order that mirrors the imaginative act.
— The Value Of Dreams
This technique emphasizes the importance of unwavering faithfulness to one's imagined desired state (the 'image' or 'dream') and actively controlling one's inner thoughts and daydreams to prevent them from becoming a 'jumble' or being modified by sensory evidence. Consistency in imagination ensures fulfillment.
— The Value Of Dreams
Neville’s Words
Control your moods as you go to sleep. I cannot find any better way to describe this technique than to call it a 'controlled waking dream.' In a dream you lose control, but try preceding your sleep with a complete controlled waking dream, entering into it as you do in dream, for in a dream you are always very dominant, you always play the part. You are always an actor in a dream, and never the audience. When you have a controlled waking dream you are an actor and you enter into the act of the controlled dream.
— Assumptions Harden Into Facts
We learn this control through the waking dream, where our attention can be maintained without effort, for attention minus effort is indispensable to changing the future. We can, in a controlled waking dream, consciously construct an event which we desire to experience in the three-dimensional world. The sensory impressions we use to construct our waking dream are present realities displaced in time or the four-dimensional world. All that we do in constructing the waking dream is to select from the vast array of sensory impressions those, which, when they are properly arranged, imply that we have realized our desire. With the dream clearly defined we relax in a chair and induce a state of consciousness akin to sleep. A state which, although bordering on sleep, leaves us in conscious control of the movements of our attention. Then we experience in imagination what we would experience in reality were this waking dream an objective fact.
— Remain Faithful To Your Idea
Let me again lay the foundation of prayer, which is nothing more than a controlled waking dream: 1. Define your objective, know definitely what you want. 2. Construct an event which you believe you will encounter FOLLOWING the fulfillment of your desire -something which will have the action of Self predominant -- an event which implies the fulfillment of your desire. 3. Immobilize the physical body and induce a state of consciousness akin to sleep. Then, mentally feel yourself right into the proposed action, until the single sensation of fulfillment dominates the mind; imagining all the while that you are actually performing the action HERE AND NOW so that you experience in imagination what you would experience in the flesh were you now to realize your goal. Experience has convinced me that this is the easiest way to achieve our goal.
— Remain Faithful To Your Idea
You can bring before your mind’s eye what the world would call a daydream – it’s still a dream – and you can give reality to that daydream until it will objectify itself and become real in your world, but you are still dreaming. You are dreaming until that moment in time when God, Who is the Lord Jesus Christ, awakes within you.
— The Most Precious Gift
What he saw in the day dream, he saw in chronological order in the night dream. Live so in your day dream that the night dreams follows in a chronological order, just as Jacob saw it regarding the striped and spotted cattle. Though all the flock is brown, I will see them spotted in my mind’s eye. And that which was brought forth was brought forth in the image held. He saw what he wanted to see in the day dream and then in the night dream, it came forth in chronological order. I could pick out a dozen people in this audience tonight who have written me about controlling their day dreams. Here is a man whose property was going to pot, his tenants were behind in their payments, the stepfather was drinking and the children were shabby and neglected. Instead of taking legal action, the owner took an imaginary ride past his property and saw it in the well-kept state in which he desired to see it. Things began to happen. My father stood on a beach in Barbados 30 years ago and saw it as a perfect place for a hotel. He never faltered in that dream.
— The Value Of Dreams
Biblical Foundations
Common Misunderstandings
This is not a collection of unrelated “hacks.” The extracted variations describe applications of the same underlying discipline: a change of consciousness precedes a change in experience. The source links preserve the context in which Neville taught each variation.
How to Practice
- Control your moods as you go to sleep.
- Induce a state akin to sleep (drowsy, meditative).
- Enter into a complete controlled waking dream, acting out the desired scenario as if you are an actor, not an audience.
- Maintain control and focus within this imaginary act.
- Clearly define the desired event or 'waking dream'.
- Relax in a chair and induce a state of consciousness akin to sleep (drowsiness, but with conscious control).
- Select and arrange sensory impressions that imply the fulfillment of your desire.
- Experience this event in imagination as if it were an objective fact in reality.
- Define your objective: Know definitely what you want.
- Construct an event: Create an imaginary scene that you would encounter following the fulfillment of your desire, with your own action predominant.
Read the Complete Sources
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