This chapter posits a prepared mind as key to later insight experiences. Following Wallas's (1926) four-stage model, preparation through failures experienced during initial solution attempts anticipates opportunities. At the time of impasse, solvers can predict necessary solution qualities by thinking through failed attempts at a more abstract level. These predictive features (Johnson & Seifert, 1994) describe needed resources, missing information, and solution characteristics, and are “seeded” into memory with the unsolved problem. Later, during incubation, attended features in the current context spontaneously retrieve the unsolved problem from memory, called opportunistic assimilation. This conscious reminding of the unsolved problem is the experience of sudden insight (Aha!). The surprised solver must then puzzle through why the current contextual features brought the problem back to mind and, in the process, restructure the old and new representational pieces into a novel solution. In this account, the insight process depends on effortful thinking during both preparation and illumination, but the incubation stage involves the simple process of associative memory as the source of insight experiences.