Dream Incubation
Category: Dream Interpretation
From Sleeping in Temples to the Line of Dream Research
The history of dream incubation goes back to Greece in the fourth century BCE. People who were ill traveled to the temples of Asclepius, the god of medicine, and after rites of fasting and bathing they went to sleep inside the temple. The priests, it is recorded, interpreted the dreams they had there and drew a course of treatment from them. At the temple site of Epidaurus, votive inscriptions have been found in which people record having been healed in a dream.
This practice was bound up with religious ritual, but it is possible to take out just the frame of going to sleep while holding a question. There is also dream research that has taken up the question posed before sleep, from the view that dreams may help with creative problem-solving. With that line behind us, our site introduces dream incubation as a procedure for letting a question rest, rather than as a device for extracting an answer.
Set the Question Down at Night, Write It Up in the Morning
The procedure usually described runs something like this. First, write out the problem you want to think about, or the theme you want to see, in a single sentence. Not a vague wish along the lines of "I want to be happy," but a question whose answer has a shape you can picture, such as "do I stay in this job or change my situation." Next, read that sentence over before bed and leave the paper by your pillow. After you close your eyes, rather than chasing the question down, hold it lightly in mind as you fall asleep.
The morning half of the procedure is what actually decides the outcome. The moment you wake in the night or at dawn, recall the fragments of the dream before you sit up, and write them down as they are. A direct answer to the question rarely comes; most of the time what turns up takes the shape of a scene or an object. Once you have written it down, look for any clue between those images and your question. Even if nothing takes shape in one night, staying with the same question for several nights gathers more material.
Cases Where Scientists and Artists Spoke of Ideas from Dreams
There are a number of cases in which a creative discovery has been told alongside a dream. The chemist Kekule, describing how he arrived at the structure of the benzene ring, recalled in a lecture late in his life that he had seen an image of a snake biting its own tail. Paul McCartney has said that he heard the melody of "Yesterday" in a dream. The mathematician Ramanujan is reported to have said that the goddess he worshipped showed him formulas in his dreams.
All of these come down to us as recollections by the people involved or by those around them, and there is no way to confirm from the outside how the dream did its work. What many people do experience, though, is the sense that a problem worked on intently during the day trails on while they sleep. Dream incubation can be described as an attempt to face that trailing on deliberately.
Three Things to Look At Again When It Does Not Work
If you try it and the theme does not show up in your dreams, there are three things you can look at again. The first is how fine-grained the question is. Rather than stopping at "what should I do," narrowing the question until you can see two or three options makes it easier to connect with a scene in a dream. The second is whether your interest is really turned toward that question. It is often said that a question you urgently want an answer to stays with you in sleep more readily than a task you have worked out in your head.
The third is the record. Even when you have had a related dream, it is common to get up without writing it down and find by midday that you can no longer recall it. Keeping a pen and paper by your pillow and writing down even a fragment is what works best. If night after night still brings nothing that takes shape, the effort of holding on to the question may itself be making your sleep shallow, so let it go for a while and put your sleep back in order first.
Was this article helpful?