Incubation

Incubation is the ancient Greek religious practice of sleeping within a sacred precinct — most canonically an Asclepian shrine — in order to receive a significant dream from the god. “Techniques for provoking the eagerly desired ‘divine’ dream have been, and still are, employed in many societies. They include isolation, prayer, fasting, self-mutilation, sleeping on the skin of a sacrificed animal, or in contact with some other holy object, and finally incubation (i.e., sleeping in a holy place)” (e-r-dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 110).

The dream that came was understood as a direct communication, and at the healing shrines it was understood as prescriptive — the god pronounced the cure. The record of Aelius Aristides preserves the practice at its most developed and most extreme: his dream-prescriptions, which he faithfully obeyed, “are the very opposite of what one would expect, and are indeed just the things which one would naturally most avoid” (Dodds, p. 116). They ranged from freezing river-baths to the demanded sacrifice of a finger. Dodds reads the pattern with restraint — “These dreams look like the expression of a deep-seated desire for self-punishment” (p. 116) — but the religious-historical significance is independent of the psychological diagnosis: the incubator submitted himself to the dream’s authority.

For the Lineage, incubation is the ancestor of the Jungian posture toward the dream. The analyst does not cross-examine the dream; the analysand does not pre-interpret it. Both place themselves at its disposal, as the incubator placed himself at the god’s. The continuity is not metaphorical — it is the same structure of psychic operation, differently framed by differing cosmologies.

Relationships

Primary sources

dodds-greeks-and-irrational (Dodds 1951, pp. 110, 115–117)