Dream
incubation refers collectively to the practices, rituals, techniques and
efforts that an individual applies to intentionally evoke helpful dreams. Derived
from the Latin verb incubare
(in- 'upon' + cubare 'to lie'), the term connotes the
support and nurturance provided by a laying mother bird for her developing egg.
The parallels with dream influence are all too appropriate; in antiquity, the aspirant
for a dream laid down to sleep in a sacred precinct with the intention of
nurturing a dream of healing or prophecy. In more modern times, the aspirant
frequently sleeps in a more profane location, but the nurturing intention
toward the ‘developing dream’ remains the same.
The
dream may be induced by engaging in several methods, techniques, rituals or
other activities on the day prior to the intended dream and often just in the
hours prior to falling asleep. The evoked dream is expected to address the
question, situation or condition that motivated the incubation effort. To
incubate a dream for a particular goal is thus to engage in an action that
brings the dream content to address this goal—preferably in a direct manner. In
the best case scenario, the dream will furnish a clear solution to a problem or
will even depict an ailment as cured.
A
common example of dream incubation today is the practice of focusing on a
personal problem prior to sleep with the intention of inciting a dream that
will help solve the problem. More esoteric examples involve the use of pre-sleep
rituals such as meditating on symbols, painting or being massaged in order to shape
the content of subsequent dreams. Incubated dreams reported in historical texts
often involved some type of epiphany by which the dreamer's life was changed. These
changes were usually brought about by the deity appearing in the dream in some
recognizable form (spirit, sacred ancestor, in the guise of a human, etc) and
effect a change by delivering a message, prescribing a healing treatment, directing
the individual to construct a sacred object or perform a sacred dance, and so
forth. Upon awakening, the incubant would typically remember the visitation and
benefit from the dream in whatever form it took. In later times, some degree of
dream interpretation by priests of the temples seems to have been introduced.
Egypt Imhotep (c. 2980bc) Greece Asclepius (c. 500bc) Rome Aesculepius (c. 250bc) Europe Christ / Saints Babylonia Ea (c. ??) Greece Serapis (c. 320bc) Figure 1. Approximate time line of dream
incubation in antiquity.
The
earliest direct reference to a pre-sleep method for obtaining dreams by divine
revelation is inscribed upon the Chester Beatty papyri—found near Thebes in
Upper Egypt—and presently in the British museum. The papyrus was authored c.1350
BC and incorporates material as far back as 2000 BC. It describes a method of
invoking the wisdom of Besa (or Bes in Egypt), a
dwarf deity, helper of women in childbirth, protector against snakes and other
terrors, and god of art, dance and music (Figure. 2). It translates as follows:
Figure 2. Sculpture of Egyptian deity Bes, Dendera Temple, Egypt
This simple Egyptian magical rite demonstrates
some similarities to the mythology and rituals later associated with temple
incubation in later Greece, such as the binding of a body part in cloth, to
bring an image of the deity in close proximity to Figure 3. Statue of Imhotep
Others
claim that incubation had an even earlier origin in Babylonian mysticism, since
the Greek god Serapis, who was also widely associated with incubation, can be traced to the much
earlier Babylonian god Ea of Eridu (also referred to
as Sar Apsi).
Still
other historical accounts link the Greek incubation tradition to Egyptian deities.
There is evidence that scientific and philosophical ideas were traded freely between
Greek and Egyptian travellers around the 5th century BC at which time it is
believed that Asclepius was imported from Egypt to Greece. The god Asclepius
parallels in numerous aspects the earlier Egyptian god Imhotep
(c.2980-2950bc; Figure 3), who was the principal architect of Pharaoh Djoser (aka Zoser) and built him
the first pyramid at Saqqara (Figure 4). Imhotep was
later deified and associated with a healing cult that is presumed to have
practiced incubation in his temple at Figure 4. View of Saqqara
necropolis, including Djoser's step pyramid built
by Imhotep (centre). The pyramid,
over 4700 years old, suffered severe damage in a 1992 earthquake and is
being repaired. Figure 5. Statue
of Greek deity Asclepius.
Epidaurus
was the most distinctive and favored of all the asklepeia and most of the available information about temple
rituals and festivals were preserved in this temple on large stone steles in its
porticoes. Two other oracular deities, Amphiaraos (at
Oropos) and Trophonius (at Lebadeia)
were closely related to the chthonian origin of Asclepius and were also the
focus of intensive incubation rituals for several centuries.
The
Egyptian cults of Isis and Serapis (Figure 6) also
established temples that flourished in Greece and Rome. These temples grew to 'surpass
in number and fame those of any other god because of the rapid spread of
incubation during the 1st centuries of the Christian era' (Hamilton,
1906a, p. 103).
Because of their far-reaching reputations for miraculous health cures and also
because of their beautiful countryside environments, many of the asklepeia, and especially the exemplary temple at
Epidaurus, evolved into thriving health resorts.
Dream
incubation can be understood as a form of spiritual quest, as an attempt to
bring oneself physically closer to a spiritual presence in preparation for a
dream. If the sense of a spirit presence could be felt vividly prior to sleep
through the incubation procedures, the presence might be induced to appear later
in a dream bearing its treasured response. The pre-sleep ritual could be seen
as an enactment in miniature of the desired closeness to the deity that was desired
in the dream.
|
Figure 6. Drawing of Serapis |
This
aspect of the spiritual attitude—the production of a feeling of ‘spiritual presence'
through pre-sleep manipulation renders many of the seemingly esoteric
incubation rites in the historical literature more comprehensible, i.e., as
ways of promoting a physically felt closeness of a deity. Such felt closeness
was cultivated both by the manipulation of icons and by sleeping in the sacred
precincts of the deity.
Perhaps
the most obvious means of attaining a physical sense of closeness to the deity
was to reside within the sacred precinct where the deity was believed to dwell.
Sleeping within the precincts was of course seen as the most direct method of
attracting the deity’s attention. This practice became so common and widespread
throughout Greece and Rome that 'sleeping in a sacred precinct' has come to be
synonymous with incubation itself.
Figure 7. Individuals often slept in a sacred
site, such as a temple or ancestor’s tomb, to procure dreams through
incubation.
·
The Berbers of Northern
Africa tried to obtain dreams wherein they could meet spirits and receive news
of absent relatives and friends by sleeping in tombs that were constructed by a
former race; the tombs were large, elliptical, surrounded by heaps of stones,
and believed to have concealed treasure (Basset,
1967);
·
The earliest Greeks to
practice incubation (the Dodonian Selloi)
slept upon earthen beds to procure prophetic dreams (Homer, Iliad, xvi, p.
233). see (Bowcott, 1959; Messer, 1918)
·
The North American
Indians frequently chose mountain-top, hill-top, or tree-top beds during their
vision quests;
·
Seekers to the Trophonian
incubation oracle in Greece slept swaddled and banded in linen upon
freshly-slaughtered ram's hides (Meier,
1989, p. 100).
Modern
science sheds some light on how sleeping in sacred precincts may have enabled
the induction of healing and problem-solving dreams. The well-known 'first-night
effect' refers to how sleep and dreams are influenced when patients or
experimental subjects sleep in the laboratory for the first time. They experience
disrupted sleep, especially REM sleep, and altered dream content. Their sleep
becomes more fragmented, with more awakenings and REM sleep may occur; dreams come
to include more references to the laboratory situation. The latter finding
strongly corroborates the idea that pre-sleep incubation affects dreams. In
addition to the sense of closeness to the deity or spirit that such changes
induced, many kinds of pre-sleep and in-sleep bodily stimulation were also
likely induced. The body may have been exposed to unexpected cutaneous and
kinesthetic sensations, such as novel textures from the sleeping garments and
covers, strange sleep postures required by irregular sleeping surfaces,
atypical night time routines, frequent night time awakenings, and so on. Modern
science has rediscovered this principle of incubation in
The
practice of bringing an image or icon of a deity into closer proximity to the
body may have had as an objective the induction of a sense of physically felt
closeness to the deity. An example of this type of ritual is cited above for
the incantation designed to invoke the wisdom of the fertility god Besa. In this case, the seeker would seem to cultivate an
attitude of closeness to the deity by drawing the icon directly on the skin and
then by binding it to the hand with cloth. Throughout the pre-dormitum period
and during awakenings at night, sensations in the hand from this procedure could
serve to remind the incubant of the deity's proximity. By suspending speech,
the seeker may have further facilitated the salience of bodily sensations,
which are known to be incorporated more readily into dream content (Nielsen
et al., 1993).
Images of the deity Besa were also frequently carved
or engraved upon stone Egyptian pillows (Foucart, 1967),
presumably to bring the deity into closer physical proximity with the dreaming
soul. In a similar fashion Egyptians placed images of deities inside of their
pillows. For example,
'. . .a
stone head-rest or pillow, of the usual form, was found at Memphis having a
small shrine hollowed in the side of it, evidently to contain an image of a god
close beneath the sleeper's head (Petrie, Encyclopedia
of Religion and Ethics, iii, p. 762).
Although
sleep in a novel locale likely always induced some change in cutaneous
stimulation during the night, more specialized forms of cutaneous stimulation
were also used in conjunction with incubation. Some of these may only have had
mild effects on the body and thus on subsequent dreams. Among these were the
practices of purificatory bathing required in some North American Indian
groups, in Greek Asclepian temples, and in the later Christian churches (Hamilton,
1906b), pp. 179ff. Other
methods were likely more moderate in their effects on both bodies and Figure 8. Some primitive peoples rubbed ashes
on the face and body to produce the pallid hue of a ghost
Finally,
some harsher procedures likely had quite extreme effects on bodily processes
and subsequent dreams. Two of these procedures are described in detail below.
The first, used by pre-Christian druids, was a complex ritual for procuring
dreams that often culminated in a sleep posture consisting of crossing the arms
and placing the palms against the cheeks.
"The
poet (or druid) chews a bit of the raw red flesh of a pig, a dog, or a cat, and
then retires with it to his own bed behind the door. . .where he pronounces an
oration over it and offers it to his ”idol gods”. He then ”invokes the idols”,
and if he has not received the illumination before the next day, he pronounces
incantations upon his two palms, and takes his idol gods unto him (into the
bed) in order that he may not be interrupted in his sleep. He then places his
two hands upon his two cheeks and falls asleep. He is then watched so that he
be not stirred nor interrupted by any one until everything that he seeks be
revealed to him at the end of a ”nomad (i.e., a day) or two or three, or as
long as he continues at his offering" (Cormac's
Glossary, cited in Greig, Encyclopedia
of Religion and Ethics, vii, p. 128).
A
second procedure, involving even more vigorous manipulations of the skin, was
performed in healing rites by Quechua Indians of Peru. These Indians fell victim
to soul loss or 'Susto' (Spanish for fright), after
some traumatic encounter with lightning, a snake, or a malevolent earth spirit.
Symptoms of the soul loss were weight loss, emotional imbalance, disturbed
sleep, and nightmares. The healing rite was to result in the patient dreaming
of a particular form of spiritual presence, specifically, the lost soul
returning to the body in the shape of a tame animal. The pre-sleep incubation
started with the patient being rubbed from head to toe with a living guinea pig
in such a way that the guinea pig died at the end of the procedure. The creature
was then skinned and a diagnosis read from its blood and entrails. In a second
session, the patient was again rubbed with a mixture of various flowers, herbs
and the flour of several grains. The medicine man wrapped the remaining mixture
in a piece of the patient's clothing and used it to mark a trail to where the
initial trauma had taken place, or else to some other dreaded place. The
patient, meanwhile, remained in a darkened house with the door left open. The
lost soul was expected to follow the trail back to the sleeping patient (Rosas,
1957, cited in (Ellenberger,
1970), pp. 7-9). Rosas
reports that he observed several cases of abrupt improvement or recovery after
1 or 2 applications of this treatment, even though medical physicians were
unable to effect change in the patients.
The
most severe incubation procedures were those which inflicted bodily pain on the
aspiring incubant. The associations between the striving for spiritual
closeness and the infliction of pain are many. First, the direct stimulation of
the body may in and of itself have been a symbolic gesture of closeness to the
deity. The chopping off of one's own finger joint
or
strip of flesh as an offering to the spirits during the vision quest of the Crow
Indians (e.g., (Lincoln,
1970), p. 145ff; (Eliade,
1964) p. 64; (Tylor, 1903),
vol 2, p. 400) can be seen as such a gesture of
closeness. However, the net effect of such sacrifices may have been equivalent
to the less destructive ritual of offering small terra cotta icons of afflicted
body parts to the deity in temples of Asklepius (),
i.e., that of enhancing a sense of bodily closeness.
Second,
the pain manipulations may have been designed to arouse emotional responses,
and thus to attract the closeness of the deity. Rubbing with nettles or
whipping (Eliade,
1960, pp. 203f)
might have served just such a purpose. Krickeberg (Krickberg, 1993)
describes the general case of the Delaware Indian puberty fast in which the boy
or girl (around age 12) is taken to a prearranged place in the forest and left
to its own devices.
"Strictly
forbidden to eat, the child remains alone with the silence of the day time and
the voices of the night. The idea is that it will implore the spirits to take
pity. The sight of the pale helpless creature, its head smeared with mud and
its arms raised, begging to be granted a vision, is calculated to arouse the
pity of sentient powers. Growing weakness - to be at its most effective the
fast should last twelve days - and partial loss of consciousness finally so
touches the hearts of the spirits that they put an end to the child's suffering
by vouchsafing a vision. The whole family remains profoundly happy for a long
period. (p. 168f)"
Finally,
painful methods of dream incubation may have been pursued because they induced
a state of exhaustion and lightness, presumably qualities which freed the
seeker's soul to approach the spiritual presence. For example, one Indian elder
stated that the benefit of fasting was to produce a sense of lightness of the
body. The following dream of an Ojibwa youth after 5 successive days of puberty
fasting suggests how such lightness might be incorporated directly into dreams.
"(the spirit and I) looked into each others
hearts, and guessed and gazed on our mutual thoughts and sensations. When he
ordered me to follow him, I rose from my bed easily and of my own accord, like
a spirit rising from the grave, and followed him through the air. The spirit
floated through the air. I stepped as firmly as if I were on the ground, and it
seemed to me as if we were ascending a lofty mountain, ever higher and higher,
eastward." (Radin,
1936), p. 239.
Other
Native Indian vision quest procedures seem allied with this theme of induced
lightness, the choice of sleeping high in trees or on hill-tops, for example.
Similarly, in some dramatic procedures, individuals would manipulate the
muscles beneath the skin by passing splints and ropes through the flesh and
suspending themselves from a high place or the
ropes and splints might be used to drag about a sacred object, such as a
buffalo skull (Spaulding,
1981) p. 337.
Four classes of incubation ritual have been
described in an attempt to illustrate how bodily experience played a central
role in both waking and dreaming aspects of dream incubation in ancient times.
Although the specific rituals described may not be appropriate for contemporary
times (e.g., pain infliction), the underlying principle of bodily effects on
dream content may be found to have some utility for bodily-oriented dreamwork.
Many
approaches to using dreams to promote well-being, enhance creativity, and solve
personal problems have been popularized in recent years. Collectively, these
approaches to dream use are referred to as 'dreamworking' (Krippner &
Dillard, 1988) and appear to be a new force in the helping professions. Some of
these (Gendlin,
1986); (Mindell,
1982); (Mindell,
1985) are 'bodily oriented'
approaches in the sense that they work with the bodily awareness arising in
dreams to promote self-transformation. Dream reflection presumably facilitates
personal growth or problem-solving by revealing bodily dimensions (e.g.,
kinesthesia, proprioception, emotion) by which problems and concerns remain
animated in private experience.
Body-oriented
dreamwork might be enhanced if it is applied together with dream incubation
methods which yield dreams rich in bodily themes. A recent laboratory
experiment suggests that such dreams are easily induced. We found that when
dreamers were given kinesthetic stimulation during REM sleep, their dreams gave
prominence to motifs of bodily transformation (Nielsen,
1986). Moreover, the
participants reacted to their altered dreams with great excitement, as if
further personal change was imminent. It seems worthwhile, then, to explore
ancient methods of dream incubation with an eye to uncovering how to induce
dreams of bodily change. The present paper is meant as a first step in this
direction.
Dreams
incubated in contemporary times using a technique modelled on the ancient
Asclepian incubation rituals (Reed,
1976) demonstrates this
theme of spiritual presence. Incubants using this procedure were often visited
by strange presences, and after they awakened, they would be confused as to
whether the visitation really happened (p. 65). One of the most vivid dreams
reported in this experiment demonstrates this reality of presence:
'She
awoke, startled to find that a strong wind was blowing, and that the tent had
blown away. A small, old woman appeared, calling out the incubant's name, and
commanded her to awaken and pay attention to what was about to happen. The
woman said that she was preparing the incubant's body for death and that the
winds were spirits which would pass through her body to check the seven glands.
The incubant was at first afraid, then took comfort in the old woman's aura of
confidence and authority, and finally yielded her body to the experience,
almost pleased with the prospect of death... (p. 66)’
The
kinesthetic presence of this image of an old woman became manifest in the
dreamer's bodily feelings of wind blowing and in her emotions of comfort,
confidence, and authority. These were likely a major reason for the dream's
realistic quality (Nielsen,
1991) and for the incubant's
ability to finally yield bodily to the experience of death. Moreover, Reed
describes several audio-visual and bodily techniques that were used in the
incubation procedure to induce such visions.
Contemporary
dreamworkers, inspired by the Asclepian traditions, have attempted to induce
vivid healing dreams using a variety of methods.
Henry Reed’s original 1976 experiment in dream incubation using a camping tent can be found here: . A more recent, permanent, outdoor structure for dream incubation can be seen here: http://www.creativespirit.net/henryreed/flyinggoatranch/dreampagoda.htm.
Deirdre
Barrett (Barrett,
1993) conducted an
incubation experiment on 76 university students. For one week, they incubated
dreams that addressed problems they had chosen. About half of the sample recalled
a dream that they judged was related in some way to their chosen problem. Most of
these thought that their dream in fact contained a solution to their problem.
Personal problems were more likely to be viewed as solved than were academic or
more general problems. The complete study can be found here: http://www.asdreams.org/journal/articles/barrett3-2.htm
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