Patton Article 1

Kimberley C.
Patton “A G R E AT A N D
S T R A NG E C O R R E C T I O N ” :
I N T E N T I O NA L I T Y ,
LOC ALITY, AND
E PI PH A N Y I N TH E
C AT E G O RY O F DR E A M
I NC U B AT I O N
Dream incubation represents a rich nexus of cognitive, performative, loc-

ative, and theological issues in the historical study of religion. The ancient
and widespread practice of sleeping in a special place in order to receive
a god-given dream was the centerpiece of a complex of charged ritual el-
ements practiced to the present day. Such fixed, “strong” places existed
around the world (temples, shrines, or churches and their precincts; graves,
caves, and mountains, for example; but the transitory sacrificial fire might
also be the site of dream incubation).1 Pilgrimage, purification, and sac-
rifice produce as their telos the efficacious dream, the “sought” dream2—
1
Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) cites A. M. Esnoul’s treatment of Tantraloka 15: Master
and disciple shared the dream that is dreamt near the sacrificial fire during initiation. See her
“Hard and Soft Reality” (Parabola 7, no. 2 [1982]: 56 and n. 6), citing Esnoul, “Les songes
et leur interprétation dans l’Inde,” in Les songes et leur interprétation, Sources Orientales
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959), 2:321.
2
See the discussion of the “sought” dream by Serenity Young, “Buddhist Dream Experi-
ence: The Role of Interpretation, Ritual, and Gender,” in Dreams: A Reader on the Reli-
gious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming, ed. Kelly Bulkeley (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), pp. 9–28 and esp. p. 12. Young’s emphasis is on the larger category that
comprises all forms of conscious seeking of a dream, noting, in Buddhist biographical nar-
ratives from India and Tibet the presence of “the various ritual means to have a dream, such as
performing a specific ritual, going to sleep in a sacred place, praying for a dream, or simply
concentrating the mind before going to sleep.” Young asserts, “The progression from spon-
taneous dream to sought dream is a reasonable development. If one accepts the prophetic
value of dreams in general, then, whether the dreams occur spontaneously or as the result of
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History of Religions 195
a venue for epiphany, supernatural remedy, divination, revelation, or

warning. The dream’s meaning frequently requires decoding or interpre-
tation, in some cases by the dreamer herself, although in most traditional
oneiric systems, by an expert. The significance of the incubated dream
can be highly personal and even mundane in its details about “what to do”
to ameliorate the specific condition of the dreamer. Or the dream can be
“big,” transpersonal, oracular, and of relevance to the entire community.
In classical antiquity, the response to a dream visit was generally an
attempt to implement the god’s advice, often accompanied by the making
of a vow or thank-offering—perhaps the erection of a stone or stele with
an account of the incubation and its aftermath—or the dedication of a
sculpture of the healed body part to show the world what the god had
done for the suppliant in her dreams. Inseparable from the concept of in-
cubation, we might add, is the place where the dream is dreamed, as well
as the place of the dream plot itself: the theater where its hieratic action
occurs, that “other place” that cannot be found on the waking map of em-
pirical transaction.
In August of 1994 I traveled as a pilgrim in the Holy Land to attend
the great nocturnal celebration of Jesus’ Transfiguration on Mount Tabor.
There I stood through a four-hour liturgy in Greek and Arabic in the
Orthodox Christian cathedral, at the New Testament site of the metamor-
phosis of a Nazarene rabbi into a divinely illumined prophet in conver-
sation with Moses and Elijah, while Peter, John, and James watched in
shock (Matt. 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–36). After the liturgy, the
congregation poured outside into the walled courtyard to witness, or
better, to instigate a miracle which, as I learned, happened every year on
this same night. When a group of Russian nuns from a certain women’s
monastery on the shore of the Sea of Galilee gathered there and sang the
Greek transfiguration festal hymn, “I Metamorphosis,” a broad column of
light, like a cloud, was annually seen to rise up about fifty yards away,
from the shoulder of the darkened hills nearby, and fly over the church.
In fact, this is exactly what took place the night I watched.
There followed a heated argument well before dawn between a priest
who wished to debunk the flying pillar of light miracle as something ex-
plicable through meteorology, and a group of Greek yiayiades, most in
black widow’s weeds, who angrily defended its sanctity. And after that
consciously setting out to have a dream, one still has received a prophecy” (p. 12). While this
may be true, the impetus for incubation (“going to sleep in a sacred place”) might, I suggest,
derive more naturally from the religious power of the place itself, rather than the quest to
have religiously valuable dreams. In other words, the starting point in a given incubation tra-
dition could be the belief that the place “does” many things of metaphysical value, including
sponsor iconic dreams for those who sleep there.
196 Dream Incubation
agon was spent, many wandered out of exhaustion back into the cathe-
dral—pilgrims from Jerusalem, Beit Jala, or Greece—who had not brought
sleeping bags or tents. And there they fell asleep, and there began to dream.
I walked through the nave of the cathedral at around five o’clock in the
morning. I saw the sleepers there, stretched along the pews, on the marble
floors, curled against the columns. There was no noise, only the animated,
rustling silence of breathing, slight movement, stirring. I remember think-
ing at the time how strange it was to see people sleeping in public; even
in airports, one is uncomfortable witnessing the intimate and defenseless
act of sleeping; one’s gaze feels exploitative. For sleeping and dreaming
have become in Western culture something one does in private, in relative
isolation. I was even more struck to see them sleeping in a holy place, for
European and American sanctuaries are decorous places of the daytime,
locked up like vaults at night against theft, and are by no means used for
collective sleeping.
Although these pilgrims did not sleep in the Mount Tabor cathedral in-
tentionally to incubate dreams, Orthodox Christians go to other “marked”
churches throughout the Mediterranean to this day to do just that. At Ta-
bor I was able to begin to imagine what mass incubations might have
looked like in the ancient world—at the shrine of Asklepios in the great
long abaton of Epidauros, where the bearded compassionate god, per-
haps in the form of a great snake, appeared to the dreamers asleep on
their klinai to prescribe remedies; or the sanctuary at Kos, where in dreams
he wiped away disease with his hand; or the mysterious round building at
the Asklepieion at Pergamon in Asia Minor with its wide-cut channels
for purifying water to run through the healing chambers, where, accord-
ing to the account of the second-century c.e. orator and hypochondriac,
Aelius Aristides of Smyrna, the god once came in a dream to his foster
father and prescribed that his (Aelius’s) bones and nerves had to be re-
moved, “for the existing ones had failed.” According to the dream doctor,
these defective elements could not simply be cut out and replaced. Instead,
there needed to be “a certain change of those existing, and thus there was
need of a great and strange correction.”3 The sought dream never left things
status quo.
What about the category of “incubation”? Where does it come from;
what does it mean; and what does it describe? With its Latin etymology,
“incubation” implies the action of lying down, and in its application, the
idea of gestating in the dark, characteristically in a small enclosed space.
The Latin cubile (whence our modern “cubicle,” the beelike cell of office
workers) means “bed; nest; lair, kennel.” In modern biological incuba-
tion, a period of heat hatches new living creatures.
3
P. Aelius Aristides, Sacred Tales 3.15, in Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, trans.
Charles A. Behr (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1968), p. 244.
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My older daughter and I once stood transfixed before a large Plexiglas-

covered incubator, perhaps four by four feet, at the Topsfield Fair in Mas-
sachusetts. A large crowd surrounded us, watching at least a hundred or
more chicks dwelling beneath the heat and the bright light, developing at
various stages from egg-hood to the complete glory of fuzzy new wings,
bopping into one another. Every fifteen minutes or so the farmer god would
appear, remove their cover, and hydrate them all into complete confusion
with a bottle mister. We could have stayed there for hours. How much
more astonishing to witness a premature infant struggle to thrive in the lit
artificial womb of a neonatal incubator.
In ancient dream incubation, ritual sleep hatched potent dreams that
diagnosed the dreamer, initiated her in special wisdom, or served as ora-
cles. As has been suggested, the simplest way to classify incubation is as
a special subset of oneiromancy, divination through dreams. In Mesopo-
tamia, as Leo Oppenheim has shown, and throughout the ancient Medi-
terranean, dream divination was a highly developed field of knowledge,
and dream classification a systematic undertaking.4 So too incubation, the
deliberate hatching of dreams at special places, was equally developed.
Benjamin Kilborne observes, “Incubation provides us with a fine example
of a process for acquiring knowledge, assuaging suffering, and seeking
divine assistance through an individual rite that relies on social practices.
As it is often physical suffering that prompts the individual to use dreams
to effect a cure, and as the dreamer who encounters the divinity often obeys
divine counsel, there is no way of dividing incubation into knowledge on
the one hand and action on the other.”5
Although “incubation” is a term from the ancient Occidental world, it
currently and problematically enjoys an expanded, almost impression-
istic usage; it is taken to mean any kind of intentional sleeping to pro-
duce dreams. “Incubation” is used by religionists to describe phenomena
ranging from the quest for visionary dreams (such as the one undertaken
by modern Cree artist Shirley Cheechoo at Dreamer’s Rock on the White
Fish Reserve in Ontario) to the therapeutic dreaming about specific unre-
solved personal situations that is encouraged in some schools of human-
istic psychoanalysis.
In the first usage just mentioned, Barbara Tedlock deploys the term “in-
cubation” to describe an event where the subject self-consciously draws
on the vision quest tradition known throughout Native American cultures,
4
A. Leo Oppenheim, “The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East: With a
Translation of an Assyrian Dream-book,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Soci-
ety 46 (1956): 179–373. See Benjamin Kilborne, “On Classifying Dreams,” in Dreaming:
Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations, ed. Barbara Tedlock (Santa Fe, N.M.:
School of American Research Press, 1992), p. 176.
5
Benjamin Kilborne, s.v. “Dreams,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade
(New York: Macmillan, 1988), 4:486.
a tradition theorized by Lee Irwin in his study of nineteenth-century Plains

peoples.6 Tedlock tells how Cheechoo and two friends prayed, burned to-
bacco and sweetgrass, and slept. They awoke. “As the new day was to
begin a hole in the sky appeared and started to form a circle.” A beam of
light came down, surrounded them; Cheechoo recounts, “I could see the
sparkles of light around me. I knew the spirits were there. I knew I had
touched another level of existence.”7
Note that the dreamer does not dream this vision and perceive its spir-
itual aperture while still asleep, but instead experiences it while awake. In
keeping with much Native American epistemology, dreaming and waking
vision are rightly not distinguished in this account; they are virtually the
same modality of revelation and transformation. But then “incubation”
does not correspond to a similar thought complex in the ancient world.
For Tedlock, the sleeping aspect of classical incubation is not mandatory
for the term’s legitimate use, whereas in antiquity there was no incuba-
tion without falling asleep, for how else could one dream?
In the second case mentioned above, at the other end of the spectrum,
one encounters the work of the analyst Carl Meier, who through his study
of the ancient dream incubations of the Asklepieia, equally self-consciously
pioneered the use of deliberate sleeping to produce healing dreams in
psychotherapy. In this usage of “incubation,” Meier’s tendency overly to
spiritualize the ancient cult of Asklepios in an attempt to validate this
appropriation is plain.8 Certainly cures at these shrines included recog-
nizably contemporary holistic therapies such as rest, exercise, psychol-
ogy, bathing, and engagement in music and drama, but also weird and
wonderful measures such as the eating of figs mixed with ashes from the
god’s altar, naked marathons in freezing rain, abstinence from bathing
for weeks, and bodily suspension upside down for long periods of time.
Accounts of dream cures often included graphic directives for radical sur-
gery, and an entire set of surgical instruments was excavated at Epidauros,
perhaps to enact a surgery stipulated in an incubated dream.9 Ancient in-
6
See Lee Irwin, The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great
Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
7
Barbara Tedlock, “Sharing and Interpreting Dreams in Amerindian Nations,” in Dream
Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming, ed. David Shulman and
Guy G. Stroumsa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 98.
8
See Carl Meier, Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy, trans. Monica Curtis
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
9
It is true that the iatroi, the physicians who were themselves mortal disciples of Asklep-
ios, were notoriously loathe to take on hopeless cases. The god would take them himself. As
one thank-offering at Epidauros, that of Aeschines the Orator, reads, “Having despaired of
the skill of mortals, but with every hope in the divine, forsaking Athens, I was healed in three
months of a festering wound which I had had on my head for a whole year.” Thus the patients
who came to the shrines of Asklepios were desperate for miracles, and grateful for even the
smallest relief, and we are not wrong in ascribing a kind of psychological urgency to the at-
mosphere of miraculous cures that prevailed there. This by no means necessarily invalidates
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cubations, no matter how elaborated their symbolic expression, usually

produced highly practical dream recommendations or predictions, and this
was most markedly true in the case of dream cures for specific afflictions.
The modern psychotherapeutic impulse to sublimate this ancient form of
medicine is far from an organic (i.e., obvious) development.
Furthermore, for Meier, the place of sleeping to produce such thera-
peutic dreams is not important, nor is the intervention of a dreamed god
per se, apart from the extent to which the therapeutic process is itself hy-
postasized (or dream symbolism is sacralized as personal revelation). In
this deployment of “incubation,” we have lost the element of divine epiph-
any, an ancient sine qua non, whereby the autonomous divine power al-
lows itself to be summoned.
We might evaluate in the same light the collaborative work of Janet Son-
enberg of the drama department at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology and psychoanalyst Robert Bosnak. Sonenberg and Bosnak have
developed incubation techniques to improve dramatic consciousness and
performance, as they explain in their recent Dreamwork for Actors.10 The
actor sleeps as (or for) the character he portrays, often focusing on a
scene with which he is having trouble. The dreams are taken as though
those of the character portrayed, not as the dreams of the actor himself.
This is a modern variant on the ancient practice of “sleeping by proxy” in
order to receive revelatory dreams for another. Awake, the actor “works”
the dreams into his body, always as a dream of his character. As a result
of the “incubation” and the dreamwork, performance becomes less styl-
ized, less overly cerebral on stage; and, as Bosnak puts it, “the acting has
a deeper feel.”
Now, intentional dreaming is here, surely, but where is the sanctuary,
the holy place of incubation, in this method? One might argue, as Bosnak
does, that the play itself is the “place,” and this is fair enough. Dreams
themselves always seem to occur in another “place.” As Lord Byron wrote
in his 1816 poem “The Dream,” “Our life is two-fold: Sleep hath its own
world, / A boundary between the things misnamed / Death and existence:
Sleep hath its own world, / And a wide realm of wild reality.” But then
we have strayed far from the highly determined “strong” place of classi-
cal incubation, the abaton where one may not walk unbidden.
Thus one might also argue that the term “incubation” in such applica-
tions has become unanchored from its original semantic field of mean-
ing. Perhaps this is always the way of religious terms and even terms of
their historicity. Psychosomatic cases were highly susceptible to cure, because sufferers had
every confidence that the god would heal them. However, we have no real grounds for doubt-
ing that cures of verifiable medical conditions also occurred, and internal orientation could
have also played a significant role in these cases, as it does to this day.
10
Janet Sonenberg, Dreamwork for Actors (New York: Routledge, 2003).
religious scholarship once they begin to drift and multiply; comparative

study is especially susceptible. It might be useful, then, as an exercise, to
return to the historical world of incubation’s origin, to its homeland, to
see what the ritual originally entailed, and whether these identifiably
separate components are—or are not—indispensable to its meaning.
A comparable analysis might be undertaken vis-à-vis the word “sha-
man” (saman) in the history of religion. The home of “shaman” is the
Tungus-speaking people of Eastern Siberia of the seventeenth century
and earlier; the Russian orthodox cleric Avvakum Petrovich, deported by
the czar to Siberia in 1672, was the first to use the Tungus word saman in
published text. The term, in his account, is elaborated by “diviner” and
“this villain of a magician”; the saman, in response to the consultation of
the Russian head of an expedition to wage war against the Mongols, sac-
rifices a live ram, screams, dances, and invokes “the demons” who possess
him and ultimately predict through him, tragically incorrectly, that the
expedition will be a great success.11 Through polemical accounts such as
this one, a picture emerges of the saman as a medium of spirits and inter-
preter of otherworldly powers, while other accounts and drawings depict
him as a drummer, a singer, a ventriloquist, and a trickster or shape-shifter
who wears animal skins and horns and can imitate animal sounds. Tungus
shamans claimed “remote” healing and harming powers as well as divi-
natory powers, and the ability to “influence the weather or the availabil-
ity of game.”12
As chronicled by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, Europeans in their
world travels often preserved indigenous terms such as pagé, piayí, an-
gaqok, and saman in their accounts to describe “special” individuals who
communicated with spirits especially to heal or to divine, even when in
the same breath they also used “sorcerer,” “wizard,” and “conjurer” in
Spanish, French, or German. Eventually, however, Swiss anthropologist
Alfred Métraux in 1944 deliberately used the Siberian shaman to describe
his subjects, who were Amazonian piai far from Siberia, defining shaman
as “any individual who maintains by profession and in the interest of the
community an intermittent commerce with spirits, or who is possessed
by them.”13 Going further, in his 1951 phenomenological study, Shaman-
11
Avvakum Petrovich, La vie de l’Archprêtre Avaakum, ecrite par lui-même (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1938), translated into French from Russian by Pierre Pascal from the 1672 Russian
original, and from French to English by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley.
12
See the discussion in the edited collection of primary sources on shamanism assembled
by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, eds., Shamans through Time: 500 Years on the Path to
Knowledge (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), p. 2.
13
Alfred Métraux, “Le shamanisme chez les Indiens de l’Amérique du Sud tropicale,”
Acta Americana, vol. 2 ([Mexico, 1944]: I:197–219 and II:320– 41), trans. Jeremy Narby
and Francis Huxley.
ism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,14 Mircea Eliade made the mastery of

“ecstasy” and celestial flight in trance a primary feature of the universal
“shamanism” he saw around the world (as opposed to the “infernal”
descent or undersea trek of, for example, the Inuit angakoq to release
marine animals from Sedna’s grasp); somatic healing was not a primary
focus of Eliade’s construction of the category, even though it had been
the primary goal of the practices of Tungus samans. Eliade’s “shaman”
has far more in common with the Lurianic master Hayyim Vital of Safed,
who used ritual weeping as a technique for achieving mystical ascent,15
than she or he does with an emergency room physician. But in the se-
mantic field of the Tungus word saman, this would be entirely backward:
spirit journeys are never an end in themselves. The shaman’s traditional
vocation is analogous to that of the doctor, not the mystic; only the tech-
nologies of healing differ, and those perhaps less than we might imagine.
Eliade rejected as the “degeneration” of pure ecstatic technique the use
of hallucinogens and psychotropic drugs, although in the last years of his
life he apparently changed his mind.16 The adept Maria Sabina, who intro-
duced Gordon Wasson to the ecstatic cult of mushrooms, was, because of
his description in Life magazine of his night of visionary power and orac-
ular insight, frequently called a “Mazatec shaman.”17 Yet the beleaguered
Sabina later told the Mexican journalist Alvaro Estrada that “before Was-
son, nobody took the mushrooms simply to find God. One had always
taken them to heal the sick.”18
In other words, the element of healing that was essential to the practice
of Tungus shamanism in its historical and religious context has been fre-
quently subsumed in a much looser use of the comparative rubric “sha-
man,” which now means something like “a trafficker in spirits” and can
be applied to anyone from a Nuer leopard-skin priest to a male Caucasian
part-time drummer in Maine. Therefore, does the term mean much of any-
thing anymore?
“Incubation” is not only a technical term in the study of religion and
dream studies; it also translates into English a cultic term or phrase in
various languages, with very specific associated fields of meaning. In an-
cient Greek, for example, the term is enkomesis: sleeping in a sanctuary.
In the Ancient Near East and in Greece, as noted above, incubation almost
14
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. from the French by
Willard R. Trask (London: Arkana, 1989).
15
See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Weeping, Death, and Spiritual Ascent in Sixteenth-Century
Jewish Mysticism,” in Death, Ecstasy, and Otherworld Journeys, ed. John J. Collins and
Michael Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 207– 44.
16
Narby and Huxley, eds., p. 135.
17
R. Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life (May 13, 1957), pp. 44–59.
18
Alvaro Estrada, Vida de Maria Sabina, la sabia de los hongos, trans. Jeremy Narby and
Francis Huxley (San Angel: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1977).
invariably comprised three elements, enacted in this particular order:

(1) intentionality, (2) locality, and (3) epiphany. Let us consider these in-
terlocked—and indispensable—elements one at a time, with attention to
the ways in which each creates religious meaning.
intentionality
By “intentionality,” I mean that the hopeful dreamer sought out inter-
action with the god for a specific reason, confusion, or affliction. One typ-
ically performed a series of ritual purifications, including fasting and
animal sacrifice—and sometimes weeping—prior to the incubation. Incu-
bation without preparation, as a means of invoking the god and attracting
his or her attention, would have been unthinkable—but also impossible.
In light of this, one wonders what kind of “dreams” the sleep laboratory
produces; perhaps it is no surprise they are fragmented, incoherent, or
apparently “without meaning” if they entail no preliminary ritual com-
munion with the god of the place, who is, in the end, a machine.19
Intentional preparation and orientation were mandatory in ancient dream
incubation. In 2 Chronicles 1:1–13, for example, Solomon dedicates a
thousand burnt offerings upon the bronze altar at the high place at Gib-
eon before his ratifying divine dream in which “God appeared to So-
lomon and said to him, ‘Ask what I should give you’ ” (2 Chron. 1:7).20
In the Ancient Near Eastern accounts, including the Biblical accounts,
one then slept on the skin of the sacrificed animal, most commonly that
of a sheep, a ram, or a goat. Greek carved stone reliefs of dream healings
from fourth-century b.c.e. Asklepieia frequently show the dreamer asleep
on an animal skin that covers the kline (sleeping couch), with the head or
legs hanging down.
Interestingly, supplicatory weeping is a frequent mode of preparation
for incubation, in texts from Hittite to Egyptian to Canaanite to Israelite,
so, as biblical scholar Susan Ackerman notes, “crying may be a ritual re-
quired of those seeking a dream visitation,”21 and “weeping precedes a
dream theophany and serves to induce it.”22 She illustrates by way of the
Herodotean account in which the obscure Pharaoh Sethos, “threatened by
the Assyrian invasion led by Sennacherib, retreated into the inner sanc-
19
For the clinically based assertion of the fundamental, global incoherence of dream nar-
ratives, see esp. Robert Stickgold, Cynthia D. Rittenhouse, and J. Allan Hobson, “Dream
Splicing: A New Technique for Assessing Thematic Coherence in Subjective Reports of
Mental Activity,” Consciousness and Cognition 3 (1994): 114–28.
20
All biblical translations are NRSV unless otherwise noted.
21
Susan Ackerman, referring to Oppenheim (n. 4 above), pp. 211–12. See Susan Acker-
man, “The Deception of Isaac, Jacob’s Dream at Bethel, and Incubation on an Animal Skin,”
in Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel, ed. Gary A. Anderson and Saul M. Olyan, Journal
for the Study of the Old Testament, suppl. ser., 125 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991): 92–120.
22
Ackerman, p. 110.
tuary of Ptah’s temple, weeping and bewailing his fate.”23 Herodotus

writes, “In the midst of his lamentations, he fell asleep, and dreamt that
the god stood by him and urged him not to lose heart; for if he marched
boldly out to meet the Arabian army, he would come to no harm, as the
god himself would send him helpers.”24
Weeping may even be prescribed: in the Hittite text of Naram-Sin,
Naram-Sin is told by the goddess Ishtar to seek help and advice from the
gods. Ishtar instructs Naram-Sin to purify himself and his bed in order to
prepare for the incubation (lines 12–13) and also to prepare by “calling
out to the gods” (line 13) and “to complain to the goddesses” (line 14).25
He did these things; the incubation was successful, and the deities an-
swered. Not all ancient incubations followed “the script”; in addition to
the surrogate incubations on behalf of another already mentioned above,
unintentional incubations are occasionally known in antiquity, such as the
one testified to by the so-called Sphinx Stele, which describes the dream
visited upon Thutmose IV as he slept between the feet of the sacred
sphinx.26 Most commonly, however, incubation is a process one enters
deliberately, intentionally, on one’s own behalf, with an eye to hatching
dreams of power.
locality
Whereas contemporary thought tends to focus on the sleeping human as
dream-maker, the fact is that traditional thought interested itself in the
dream, a supernaturally generated “place-event” where the god or holy
teacher could visit: Sufi initiation by the pir often takes place in dreams,27
and Hayyim Vital, the chief disciple of Isaac Luria, mourned for a year
after the Ari’s death because his beloved teacher did not come to him in
his dreams, even though he lay down each night anticipating the contin-
uance of their relationship.28
Furthermore, the “place” that is the dream’s setting is usually radically
connected to the place where the dream is dreamed. The concrete, sanc-
tified site of falling asleep (one level of the ritual experience of incuba-
tion) is the bottom rung of the ladder, which corresponds to the next rung,
23
Ibid.
24
Herodotus, Histories 2.141, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt.
25
H. G. Güterbock, “Die historische Tradition und ihre literarische Gestaltung bei Baby-
loniern und Hithitern bis 1200,” ZA 44 (1938): 49–65; see discussion in Oppenheim (n. 4
above), pp. 188 and 200, and Ackerman, p. 109 and n. 2.
26
J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3d ed., with
suppl. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 449; Ackerman, p. 110.
27
See Katherine Ewing, “The Dream of Spiritual Initiation and the Organization of Self-
Representation among Pakistani Sufis,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 56–74.
28
From Hayyim Vital, Sefer ha-Hezyonot, pt. 1, no. 23 (Jerusalem, 1914). This dream took
place in 1609. Translation by Howard Schwartz.
the dream’s place (another level where there is holiness) and makes access
possible. Classical religious incubation is “all about” sleeping in a partic-
ular place, a place set apart; that element of locality is not negotiable. If
I want to be healed by Asklepios, I must bring my wounded body to him
at his shrine, and after I have fasted and purified myself and made special
offerings in the walled temple precinct, I must sleep in the abaton, to-
gether with other sufferers and under the watchful, scripted mediation of
priests, with the shared goal of receiving a therapeutic dream from the
god. The topographical element is paramount: incubation invariably takes
place in a prescribed holy place, on the ground or a special cot, where the
“membrane” between the mundane and sacred worlds is thin. When in
Genesis 28:11 Jacob lies down to sleep “because the sun had set,” it is at
a certain place, upon a particular rock, Bet-El, the House of God, and it
is there and only there that he can “watch” the angels ascending and de-
scending from heaven. The incubating sleep in the special place is in turn
a kind of preparation of the soul-space for the epiphany, much in the
same way Vedic sacrifice begins with the creation of soft grass seats for
the gods to come down and sit upon the altar. Ancient dream incubation
most emphatically could not happen “just anywhere.”
We postmoderns may resist this idea at first, for so much of our sense
of place has been flattened out by global communications, giving the il-
lusion of the world’s highly varied “scapes” as interchangeable backdrops
for human enterprise. One summer evening in Central Square in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, I saw an ad for AT & T wireless phones. It read,
“5th Avenue. Utah. Same place.” Behind the print, a beautiful man spoke
on a cellular phone in front of a great red rock formation, perhaps Arches
National Monument. The fact is that Fifth Avenue and Utah are not the
same place; they each have their own history and their own gods. Although
we each surely carry our psychic luggage with us wherever we go, the
classical idea of incubation would dictate that we dream differently at
each place we might sleep, in response to the spirit of that place. The
concept of incubation would also imply that we tend to fare better in our
deliberate dreaming at the “strong” place (locality) if we orient ourselves
to the powers of the place before falling asleep (intentionality), and then
tell the truth about the encounter (epiphany) by acknowledging it—even
publicizing it—afterward. Incubated dreams did not remain “personal”
for long.
The place of sacred sleep in classical incubation is never incidental.
Like the omphalos at Delphi, like the great city of Teotihuacan, like the
mountain at Sinai, like the caves of Chauvet or Dordoigne, places sought
for incubation are permeable. They can be natural places where divine
power is manifest, which Eliade called kratophanies, or they can be hu-
manly constructed, such as the great temple at Orissa or the small stone
waybil shrines of the Maya; or they can be a combination of both, as in

places where there has been an architectural or artistic response to an
anomaly of the terrain, something strange or reminiscent that demands
attention—something that, to use Australian aboriginal conceptual lan-
guage, “pushes.”
If one sleeps in such places, and enters that “other” mode of conscious-
ness, one stands—and expects—a better chance of encountering the god
than when one sleeps elsewhere. This is the logic of incubation—an in-
ternal, ritual logic, but highly resilient and notably similar across reli-
gious cultures. The portal of the place opens the portal of the dream.
Incubation places are god-haunted; they are places with which the god
is identified, and so is most likely to be found in sleep; thus incubated
dreams are god-sent (theopempti, as Aelius Aristides said).
Probably the oldest sacred place in the Mediterranean was the earth it-
self. In ancient Greek religion, the earth was a goddess, the home of the
deposed Titans and the dead. The Earth was believed to engender dreams.
In Euripides’ Hecuba, the heroine, the wife of King Priam of the Trojan
War, addresses the earth at line 70, “O potnia Chthon, melanon pterugon
meter oneiron” (O Lady Earth, mother of black-winged dreams).29 Asklep-
ios, as a divinized hero, had both Olympiam temple and chthonic tholos
shrines at his sanctuaries, and it is clear that although he is the son of
Apollo, as a dead hero he is nevertheless a great subterranean force as
well. Homer’s ancient priests of Dodona, the Sel’loi, “with feet un-
washed,” sleep without covers directly on the ground in order to maintain
their prophetic power and almost certainly to incubate dreams (Iliad
16.235). Hermes is the conductor of souls as well as the hegetor oneiron.
We have already noted that Jacob lies directly upon the earth, with a
stone as his pillow, to receive his revelatory dream, and as Ackerman
tells it, the Roman kings Latinus and Numa “both lie on the ground to
incubate, even though they, as royal personages, could surely command
beds.”30 As we shall see, the most common place that the practice of
incubation survives in the Abrahamic traditions in the Near East and
Northern Africa is at the tombs of the saints, for the connection between
dreams and death there is highly determined, as it is in so many other tra-
ditions. For example, in the classical Mayan imagination, as Lawrence
Sullivan describes it following the Popul Vuh, “the ‘underworld’ to which
the soul is translated after death is the same primordial world-condition
visited during the royal dream, vision, and hallucination.”31
29
See the discussion in Angelo Brelich, “The Place of Dreams in the Religious World
Concept of the Greeks,” in The Dream and Human Societies, ed. G. E. von Grunebaum and
Roger Callois (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 299.
30
Ackerman, p. 116.
31
Lawrence Sullivan, personal communication, June 2, 2003.
While it can be a natural place, the site of classical incubation is most

commonly a sanctuary; like the Temple of Solomon, this place results
from a divine directive, a heavenly plan. It cannot be sublimated. In his
essay “Astral Dreams in Judaism,” Moshe Idel describes what he calls
“oneiric techniques” practiced by medieval kabbalists such as Abraham
ibn Ezra and others, whereby through restructuring the letters of key Bib-
lical verses from the Torah, such as Exodus 25:22, in which God prom-
ises to speak from between the two keruvim that guarded the ark, one
could receive private angelic revelation by going to sleep and dreaming.
These are unabashedly theurgic strategies, and phenomenologically they
bear little difference from outright magic. Commenting on a pseudo-
Maimonidean epistle of the same genre, Idel rightly distinguishes such
techniques from classic incubation in the following way: “The strong
God, who presided in the Israelite sanctuary and who revealed himself
only in the sacrosanct locus between the keruvim, is now replaced by
weaker entities, the angels, who can be induced to go everywhere. . . . It
should be stressed that the temple, fixed in place, has been replaced by
the extraordinary human experience during the dream. Unlike incubatory
experiences well known since ancient times (where the strength of the
locus was crucial for eliciting the divinatory dream), in the kabbalistic
epistle, the place basically irrelevant.”32 He continues, “That is why I pre-
fer the term ‘oneiric technique’ to ‘incubation,’ a term commonly con-
nected to a sacred shrine or sanctuary.”33
In other words, as Idel notes, “incubation is often related not only to
fixed places, such as temples, but also to strong gods that preside over
these shrines, while the oneiric techniques as represented by the she’elat
halom literature are mobile and, while addressing the supreme deity, they
involve the reception of the answers from weaker intermediary powers,
such as the angels.”34 If, in the study of Jewish mystical thought, we ad-
here to Idel’s rigorous application of the term, true incubation only occurs
at the house of a god, and elicits the dream visit of the god himself; false
incubation happens anywhere and only produces those divine wannabes,
the angels.
epiphany
Likewise, it is not surprising that in ancient Greek and ancient Near East-
ern thought, dreams come as messages from the gods; the Greek verb used,
as Carl Meier points out, is episkopein: “to visit.” The person does not
32
Moshe Idel, “Astral Dreams in Judaism: Twelfth to Fourteenth Centuries,” in Shulman
and Stroumsa, eds. (n. 7 above), p. 242.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid., p. 249, n. 42.
have the dream; the dream visits the person, who “sees the god” in that
dream. We are as far as possible from the world of the French expression,
“j’ai fait un rêve.”35 Without the god’s appearance (or saint’s, or pir’s, in
modern dreams), the incubated dream is not efficacious, for one cannot
be sure of what to do unless one hears it directly from the horse’s mouth.
Not an “insight,” not a personal change or new direction, not a “rethink-
ing”: a god, who cannot only heal in dreams, but even beget children, or
dictate the text of speeches (Aelius Aristides often wrote kata; ta;Í twÅ n
ojneiravtwn epipnoÇaÍ, “according to the inspiration of god-sent dreams”).
In the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, as in most incubating socie-
ties, the god can always take theriomorphic form in the solicited dream
and be just as powerful as in anthropomorphic form, if not more so. The
Greek healing gods Asklepios and Amphiaraios, for example, routinely
took the form of a great serpent in incubated dreams.
Aelius Aristides presents in his Sacred Tales one of the most striking
accounts of a dream epiphany, and of the magnetic, tender shock it in-
duced in the dreamer. He writes,
For there was a seeming, as it were, to touch him and to perceive that he himself
had come, and to be between sleep and waking, and to wish to look up and to
be in anguish that he might depart too soon, and to strain the ears and to hear
some things as in a dream, some as in a waking state. Hair stood straight, and
there were tears of joy, and the pride of one’s heart was inoffensive. And what
man could describe these things in words? If any man has been initiated, he
knows and understands.36
The god’s coming in the sought dream is the fulcrum of all the ritual ori-
entation that has preceded it, and all that will ensue afterward. It is an
iconic encounter. It is the goal of the dream.
the rectification of categories

Intentionality, locality, epiphany. Understood in its original context, incu-
bation turns out to be a rather precisely constructed category. The com-
parative study of religion has come under fire for flattening out differences
in religious practice and philosophy through its use of broad categories to
describe apparently universal phenomena. The history of this practice lies
35
The notion of dreams as the product of the dreamer is known elsewhere, as in Indian
thought, although in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, the dreamer creates an interior reality from
the stuff of his outer reality: “there are no ponds, lotus-pools, or flowing streams there; but he
emits ponds, lotus-pools, and flowing streams. For he is the Maker” (Brhadaranyaka Upan-
isad 4.3.9–10, translated and discussed by Wendy Doniger [O’Flaherty] in Dreams, Illusions,
and Other Realities [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], p. 16). But as Doniger
points out, this ontology makes the dreamed world no less real.
36
Aelius Aristides, Sacred Tales 2.32, in Behr, trans. (n. 3 above), p. 230.
in the strong interest in classification inherited from philosophical phe-

nomenology. Many of these terms are Western or monotheistic in their
origin; so, for example, as has been elaborately developed in the past de-
cades, the idea of “scripture” might illumine the Vedas but only partially
help us to understand the role of divinatory texts in Taoism or else com-
pletely confuse our study of the Iliad and Odyssey, sung poems that for
at least a thousand years were central in ancient Greek religious culture
but were not codified until very late in their history, nor used by institu-
tionalized hierarchies to undergird an orthodox theology.
Recently, comparative study has undergone a kind of crisis of self-
examination in which it has swung away from the imperialism of the non-
reflective use of these categories and toward the other extreme, wherein
one cannot use a single term to describe analogous or similar phenomena
from different religions. Of course this too is intellectually constrictive,
for many religions share observably similar structures—such as concepts
of evil, or priesthood, or relics, or the power of blood, or twins, or trees—
and scholars of religion need a way to think and speak about such simi-
larities without repressing differences.
As a middle path, Jonathan Z. Smith has recently suggested a compar-
ative process he calls “the rectification of categories.”37 Smith argues that
a category may retain its validity as long as we allow data from cultures
outside its origin to continue to influence, to nuance, and to qualify our
usage of that category, rather than indiscriminately shoehorning it into
footwear to fit every size.
In this spirit, I do not mean to suggest that terms in the history of re-
ligion cannot evolve, nor that they must slavishly reveal their genealogy
in every appropriate usage or be jettisoned. Following Smith’s principle
of rectification, I believe that the category of dream incubation is still use-
ful and can still continue to be rectified, as long as we know and respect
its highly specific historical context, and appreciate its profoundly cultic
meaning. To reiterate, incubation meant deliberate sleeping in a holy
place after ritual preparation in order to produce religiously meaningful
dreams in which the god showed himself or herself in an efficacious way
to solve the problem, heal the illness, or give the message.
Must it still mean all these things? In my view, we might use the term
“incubation” absent one of the three main elements of intentionality, lo-
cality, or epiphany, but I seriously question whether two can be missing
and still allow the term to be meaningful. In other words, if I sleep non-
intentionally in a generic place and a god shows up in my dream, I am
37
See Jonathan Z. Smith, “The ‘End’ of Comparison: Redescription and Rectification,” in
A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, ed. Kimberley Patton
and Benjamin Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 237– 41.
not incubating. But if I sleep intentionally in a holy place and a cucumber

appears, I am incubating. Especially if I am sleeping among the Nuer,
where cucumbers can sacrificially substitute for sacred cattle.
modern examples of “true” or “classical”

dream incubation
Some modern cases of ongoing dream incubation practice contain all three
of these original elements, as well as the “aftermath” of publicly sharing
the miracle of the dream. In India, temple incubations exist in Bengal,
and in coastal Orissa, among other places. Interestingly, these often entail
origin myths “that included therapeutic temple sleep and visitations by
the deity.”38 Although various kinds of healing constitute the most com-
mon goal of Hindu temple incubations, other miracles can be sought. The
dream cure involves an isolation and liberation of the individual, a cut-
ting of the usual social moorings; this is true of all pilgrimages, as Victor
and Edith Turner have repeatedly shown. Unlike other kinds of pilgrimage,
however, incubation also requires an entry into the place of the goddess,
both topographically and theologically, and a kind of unfettered intermin-
gling of self with her purposes. As James Preston sensitively observes,
The intriguing element is the incorporation of the individual into the bosom
of the temple, where he returns to a womb-like environment to be healed, while
the deity absorbs the pollution from his disease. The person identifies with the
deity. He lives in the temple day and night, performing various tasks, assists the
priests when needed, and escapes from the pressures of caste, village commu-
nity, and kin. Through identification with the deity, new life is breathed into the
devotee. Thus, the miracle is not only a cure of body but also a healing of the
torn spirits of fragile people.39
We have, for example, attestation of a continuous practice of incuba-

tion at Mahabalipuram in India, at the shrine of the goddess Parvati, built
in a.d. 700. Parvati gives children to barren women. Ania Teillard offers a
description from the early 1960s of an incubation rite by a barren woman
at the goddess’s temple with the goal of conception:
Sita Lakshmi . . . was obliged to dedicate herself entirely to the service of

the goddess. . . . She was allowed one meal a day, and a little milk and fruit in
the evening. Morning and night, she made the round of the temple one hundred
and eight times, imploring the goddess to hear her and calling her by her innu-
merable names. As is customary, to avoid any mistake, at each round she put a
38
James J. Preston, “Cosmic Implosion: Miraculous Experience in Hinduism,” Anima 2,
no. 2 (1986): 157.
39
Ibid.
little pebble in a small sack hanging from a tree. This time of preparation lasted
six months.
When the sixth month came to an end she was to make the round of the tem-
ple for the last time; she must not walk, but roll around it on the rocky ground.
Her parents were obliged to help her for she could not do it alone.
At last the decisive moment arrived. Sita Lakshmi was led by the priests into
the temple. There, behind the altar, was a stone bench where the suppliant must
await in holy sleep the judgement of the goddess. . . . Lying on the hard bench,
she implored the goddess with fervent prayers until the moment of sleep.
Then she had a dream: an aged priest came to her bearing a bronze tray with
four coconuts, three large and one small. He offered the tray to her, casting the
small coconut onto the ground, where it was broken into pieces.
The priests interpreted her dream for her. She was to give birth to four chil-
dren, but one of them would die young.40
Teillard goes on to comment that the interpretation of Sita Lakshmi’s

dream proved to be entirely correct.
Note that all the elements of dream incubation known from the classi-
cal world are present in this account: intentionality, including ritual
preparation that also entails fasting, physical ordeal, and even weeping
as a preparatory communication—in the act of “complaining to the god-
dess”—locality (sleeping in a sanctuary), dream epiphany (the sacerdotal
coconuts), and a commentary upon the aftermath of the incubation in-
cluding the veracity of the dream.
In the Orissan temple of the Mother, where therapeutic temple sleep is
called dharana in Oriya, pilgrims travel long distances to the shrine, fast,
pray, and expect that as a usual result the deity will visit them in a dream
and cure them of their illness. Preston describes the situation: “At the
temple goddess Sarala in rural Orissa, which I studied extensively, there
were always two or three people at any time undergoing a dharana cure.
Typically the devotee comes to the temple, lies upon a straw mat all day
and night, prays, eats only prasad (consecrated food offered to deities),
drinks holy water, and bathes three times per day. The ritual is an act of
purification and, if it does not work after three days, it is extended for
twenty-one days.”41
40
Ania Teillard, Spiritual Dimensions (La dimension inconnue) (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1961). This type of incubation in India has a heritage of many centuries, if not
millennia. Compare the seventh-century Indian account, Kadambari by Banabhatta, in which
in order to conceive a son, Queen Vilasavati sleeps in the temples of the goddess Candika
and tells the resulting dreams to Brahmans for interpretation. This account is cited in David
N. Lorzen, The Kapalikas and Kalamukhas: Two Lost Saivite Sects, 2d ed. (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1991), pp. 16–17, and discussed in Young (n. 2 above), p. 22, n. 18.
41
Preston, p. 157.
SHORT
Preston’s research also encompassed more extreme cases, calling for

more drastic measures such as longer incubations. The results of these are
interesting from both a phenomenological and a theological point of view:
In some cases serious diseases like syphylis, gonorrhea, or leprosy (considered to

be ritually, as well as physically polluting), may require the individual to stay
at the temple for a thousand days to be cured miraculously. As one man expressed
it: “My syphylis was cured completely after a thousand days at the temple. My
body is now intermingled with the Mother (the goddess). She is in my body.”
The man who reported this was emotionally disturbed and appeared to be pos-
sessed by the deity. This kind of dharana cure is more extreme than most be-
cause, instead of merely dreaming about the goddess, the individual has become
possessed by her.42
the consequences of incubation

A thousand days! “She is in my body”! Perhaps what is described in
neurophysiological literature as “difficulty distinguishing dreams from
reality and vice versa”43 in the case of brain lesions or psychosis might
emerge in the semantic field of incubation as something quite spectacu-
lar, an integration of realms of knowing that are usually in most individ-
uals distinct, even socially construed as at odds with one another.
In the Ancient Near East the successful incubation was publicly signi-
fied by the making of a vow, erecting a thank-offering or inscription, or
setting up a stone or a painting at the spot of the efficacious dream. The
grateful Hellenistic patient of Asklepios dedicated ≥atra or sΩstra, thank-
offerings, according to his or her wealth. These could take, among other
things, the form of a sacrificed cock (as in Socrates’ final words to Crito),
a composed paean, a stele with a dream account, or a sculpted image of
the healed part; cases of god-sent relapse in the event of tardy payment are
known.44 Yet as just reported, the aftermath of an intense or prolonged in-
cubation can be a degree of possession by or absorption into the deity;
after the incubation, if it produces the desired dream of the god, one’s life
is no longer entirely one’s own.
It is as though the prolonged contact through dreams with the holy place,
and thus with the god that lives there, has blurred the edges of the distinct
and socially defended personality; the god has infested the dreamer. This
is understandably especially true of healing dreams, and the worse the
illness or wound, the truer it is. There can be said to be a kind of fusion
42
Ibid.
43
M. Morris, D. Bowers, A. Chatterjee, and K. Heilman, “Amnesia following a Discrete
Basal Forebrain Lesion,” Brain 115 (1992): 1834.
44
See Meier (n. 8 above), p. 66.
of the smaller self with the larger, and this might even be asserted with-
out psychoanalytic overtones. That fusion can be forged by gratitude alone,
and it is the result of the invasion of the personal world of one’s dreams
by the transpersonal godhead.
Later these extreme cases might stay at the healing shrine and become
permanent fixtures, dream “hangers-on”; in Hellenistic Greek cultures,
they were called katochoi, literally, “voluntary prisoners,” such as the no-
torious and prolific Aristides, who took up residence at the Asklepieion
at Pergamon intermittently for a total of twelve years. As Preston’s ear-
lier observation illumines, this condition is not a mentality that is sepa-
rate from that of a normal seeker of dreams at a shrine. Rather, it simply
represents a more extreme existential condition and behavior on the spec-
trum of incubation; that spectrum inevitably mandates identification with
the god who “dreams through” and thus into the sufferer. One belongs to
the goddess by dint of having dreamed her; this is made manifest by
those who remain at the incubation shrine instead of going home.
royal incubation
Having established the category of incubation, and seen that even with its
classical elements, it is very much alive today, we can now begin to see
how it was elaborated in ancient times, and we can trace such themes in
modern practice. Royal dreams, whereby “the sacral king . . . was the
principal ‘dreamer’ in the land,”45 were especially valuable for their di-
vinatory power. Royal dreams were also generative dreams: in the Ther-
avadan account, after participating for seven days in the midsummer
festival (Asahala) in Kapilavatthu, Queen Maya bathes in scented water,
distributes alms, climbs into her royal bed, and incubates a dream that in
turn incubates the Buddha. She is transported to a celestial couch beneath
a great tree in the Himalayas; there in that mighty place a great white el-
ephant bearing a lotus flower in his trunk circumambulates her three
times and gently enters her womb on the right side.46
While noting that dream incubation was frequent in medieval Buddhist
Japanese shrines (and, we might add, in popular modern Japanese Shinto-
ism as well, as in the sacred precinct of the ritually unpolluted island of
Itsuku-shima), Carmen Blacker has suggested the practice plausibly ex-
isted in ancient Shinto, particularly at the time of the imperial succession.
In the oldest and most occulted ceremony in “the ritual sequence which
marks the consecration of the Japanese emperor,” the daijosai, which in-
45
Carmen Blacker, “The Shinza or God-Seat in the Daijo-sai—Throne, Bed, or Incuba-
tion Couch?” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 17, nos. 2–3 (1990): 194.
46
Nidana-Katha 1.50, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids from the birth narrative that introduced a
version of the Jatakas, cited in Young (n. 2 above), p. 10 and n. 13.
cludes such prehistoric features as the absence of any metal in the ritual
building and the emperor’s eating from “rough earthenware vessels and
oak-leaf dishes . . . on which he offers food to the kami,” as well as the
wearing of a celestial feather robe, Blacker argues that the shinza or god-
seat, believed to be a throne or a bed within the shrine, may well have
been an incubation couch.47 The ceremony is first attested in the reign of
the Emperor Tenmu (r. 672–87), although it may well be older. The “hatch-
ing” emperor wrapped himself in a kind of magical coverlet, reenacting
the prized state of utsobo, “hollowness” to the divine. For the daijosai
to have been efficacious, the new emperor must have lain on the shinza,
closely shrouded in layers like a cocoon, and hence in darkness: he must,
in other words, have gestated the “nascent soul of his ancestors.”48 Ori-
guchi Shinobu suggests that this symbolic process, in the extraordinary
rite called ofusama, is deeply imbedded in Japanese culture.49 As Blacker
expresses it, “spiritual power, if it is to grow and mature, needs a period
in the darkness of a sealed vessel.” This is surely reminiscent of classical
incubation with its theme of the retreat of the weeping, sleeping king into
the darkest, most recessed sanctuary of the god: stripped of imperial dis-
plays of power, the ruler must become a kind of egg to be refertilized by
the divinity, which is the source of his hegemony, the source which alone
can maintain it.
In the Near East and the Mediterranean, as we have seen, rulers are fre-
quent incubators of dreams; while these dreams can have personal mean-
ing, usually they have far wider import. Direction of communal activities,
especially as regards the construction of sacred sites, the waging of war,
and questions concerning agriculture and disease, are frequent topoi of
royal dreams. The king as the god’s representative on earth was obligated
to dream on behalf of his people; in the case of the Japanese emperor, as
Blacker remarks, “He was the chief link, through oracular dreams, with
the world of the kami and the supernatural knowledge which lay in their
gift. He had only to lie down to a ‘ritual sleep’ for a kami to appear with
the answer to a problem that seemed hitherto insoluble. Incubation for
the emperor was therefore an important religious duty.”50
In Mesopotamia, royal dreams are usually highly stylized “message
dreams” where the deity communicates with the dreamer, who is then
enabled to communicate the god’s will to his people. The dreams of
Pharaoh in the Joseph stories in Genesis (Gen. 41:25–36) are, as Benja-
min Kilborne calls them, “symbolic dreams,” which spell out the future and
47
Blacker, pp. 179, 190.
48
Ibid., p. 191.
49
Origuchi Shinobu, “Reikon no hanashi” (On the soul in spirits), in Origuchi Shinobu
zenshu (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1950), 3:260–74.
50
Blacker, p. 194.
which can be interpreted by a “religious man in touch with the deity.”51

As a seer in touch with the god who originated the dreams, Joseph can
interpret Pharaoh’s cryptic dreams; the twin dreams, though symbolically
plotted, of seven years of plenty being devoured by seven years of fam-
ine, are warnings for the people that only Pharaoh can originate.
The relationship between royalty and ritual dreaming emerges as even
more complex in the past and present tradition of the Maya, with the
addition of the enlivened, swirling realm of death. In Momostenango, a
town in the Guatemalan highlands, the K’iche’ people maintain lineage
shrines, called cofrodía shrines—small stone monuments in the shape of
boxes, stone effigies of houses. Here the ordinarily imprisoned souls of
the dead can cluster on special days to commune with their relatives and
to be propitiated by them.52 Pregnant women are presented before the
shrines so that “lineage priest-shamans can ‘sow or plant’ the soul of the
new family member into her womb from the pool of ancestral souls.”53
These humanly built shrines are often near special spots in the natural
world, springs or mountaintops, and they represent a direct material con-
tinuity with the ancient Maya, as Linda Schele argues in Maya Cosmos.
In the K’iche’ language, which has its roots in classical Mayan, the word
for such a shrine is warabal ja, literally “sleeping house.” The modern
term is derived from the glyph waybil.54 Waybil can refer to a number of
important sanctuaries, including the Temple of the Inscriptions at Tikal.
“U Waybil ch’ul is the name of a class of little stone houses” excavated
near a small L-shaped building on a terrace excavated in 1991 in the clas-
sical city of Copan in the Yucatan. U waybil ch’ul means “the sleeping
51
Kilborne (n. 4 above), p. 177.
52
Linda Schele, in David Fredel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three
Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: William Morrow, 1993), pp. 188–89.
53
Ibid., p. 188. Schele remarks, “The idea of souls waiting in such a locality might well
strike us as something akin to Purgatory in Christianity. . . . [elsewhere in Maya Cosmos] we
are given an example of Maya people dancing to temporarily release the souls of their ances-
tors from such a place, which they liken in that context to a jail. At the time of the Conquest,
many Maya regarded the afterlife as an unpleasant sojourn in a dark, damp place like a cave.”
54
Schele elaborates, “Waybil is the participle of way, ‘to sleep.’ A house called a waybil
is a sleeping place just as warabal is ‘sleeping’ in K’iche’. Since way also means ‘transfor-
mation,’ a waybil can be a dormitory or a bedroom—but it can also be a place where one
dreams and transforms into the soul companion” (ibid., p. 188, n. 30). Nikolai Grube and
Linda Schele built on the 1989 research of Stephen Houston and David Stuart on “the glyphic
usage of waybil as ‘sleeping place or article’ . . . where the wayob manifested” by highlight-
ing the “explicit use of this term in reference to lineage and cofrodía shrines in modern
K’iche’ communities” (ibid.). In other words, the classical Maya dream incubation sites,
waybil, the places of traffic with the world of spirits, may well have been lineage shrines that
represent the repository for ancestral souls; hence the spiritual realms of sleep and death, and
the invocation of their denizens through dream incubation, would have been closely knit in
the Mayan thought-world, and this may well have continued up to the present day.
SHORT
(or dreaming) place of god.” In Yukatek, tzak means “to conjure” or “to
conjure clouds.” The building portrayed ancestor cartouches “surrounded
by S-shaped cloud scrolls,” either clouds in the sky or clouds of incense
smoke, “floating in the reliefs over the images of the waybil in which the
ancestors of Copan’s royal house were conjured.”55
At Palenque, an ancient tablet refers to the replacement of the soul of
a ritual dancer (dressed as the animal companion, the way, of a deceased
king) by that very king after he has “entered into his dreaming-place,”
the lineage shrine or waybil. The glyph “way,” deciphered as “companion
animal spirit” by Nikolai Grube and David Stuart, derives from the words
“to sleep” and “to dream.” Wayob, the animal companion spirits of royals,
often are shown dancing in the shape of human beings floating in the air.
Thus the shrine home of the dead, of the ancestral spirit, is called “the
sleeping (or dreaming) house of the god.” The waybil ch’ul of the past
and the warabal ja of the present are places on earth where the divinized
dead can dream and can reach the living. The divine ancestral spirit sleeps
and dreams at these particular places, and the living dreamer at the same
places can have access to the same spirit. This conflation of ideas around
the three themes we have identified—intentionality, locality, and epiph-
any—would then be centuries old among the K’iche’. An informant at
Momostenango told Garrett Cook, “This then is what I believe. It is as
we say when we dream of someone who had died. We have known him
and we have a dream. Then we say that the spirit comes down visibly to
our spirits in this way when we sleep, and so the two spirits converse, the
living and the dead.”56
the theology of incubation: monotheistic tensions

One of the most interesting ways to study incubation is to chart its his-
tory once monotheistic “ethical” theologies supersede polytheistic “the-
urgic” ones in the Near East and the Mediterranean. Sanctified sleeping
not only persists but is correspondingly excoriated by religious purists;
this begins as early as the Hebrew prophets. There are two main reasons
for this, which are interrelated. The first is that Abrahamic monotheism,
beginning with ancient Judaism, always sought radically to distinguish it-
self from its pagan neighbors by condemning their practices. The warning
is always sharp and clear, drawing its rhetorical strength from obviously
55
Ibid., p. 190.
56
Garrett Cook, “Quichean Folk Theology and Southern Mayan Supernaturalism,” in
Symbol and Meaning beyond the Closed Corporate Community: Essays in Mesoamerican
Ideas, ed. Gary H. Gossen (Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of
New York at Albany, 1986), p. 146.
manifest violations: “The Phoenicians sacrifice their children; Israelites

should not. The Sumerians believe that their gods literally eat their sacri-
fices; Israelites should not. Contiguous peoples worship deities in the form
of images; Israelites should not.” The practice of dream incubation was
equally suspect, but like all of the practices just mentioned, it continued
to be practiced by the Israelites, by the early Christians, as well as in the
Islamic world. This has created tension between orthodox authority and
popular practice, which we see reflected in sources from ancient to mod-
ern times.
As we have said, incubation was at its root a form of oneiromancy, a
way of divination through dreams. It was also, apparently, a form of the-
urgy, of cajoling or ritualistically compelling the god to appear, grant an
audience to the dreamer, and do what gods do: diagnose, heal, predict.
Furthermore, incubation was and remains profoundly dependent upon the
“spirit of place.” In other words, the theology of incubation highly local-
izes the god, limiting his ability to affect human beings through dreams
to special, often cultically identified, places. Finally, dream incubation
offers revelation in a democratic, plurally disseminated form that is very
difficult to validate or to control through religious authority.
Monotheistic self-representation naturally resists and seeks to control
these theological aspects of incubation. Yet such resistance was histori-
cally difficult to uphold by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers wish-
ing to separate themselves from such premonotheistic practice, not only
because incubation was such an established practice in the Near East, but
also because authoritative dreams do in fact figure in all three traditions.
The omnipotent God sends “big” dreams: in the Hebrew Bible, the dream
of Jacob at Bet-El, Joseph’s dreams, and those of Pharaoh and Solomon
and other kings and prophets. In the New Testament, one encounters the
dreams of Joseph concerning Mary’s conception of Jesus by the Holy
Spirit; his dream telling him to flee with her and their infant son to
Egypt; the dream of the three wise men to “go home by another way.” In
Islam, the mi‘raj nameh, the “night-journey” of the Prophet to the sev-
enth heaven to converse with God, has been understood by Shi‘i and Sufi
interpreters as a dream, although Sunni tradition makes it a literal jour-
ney. Muhammad undergoes internal cleansing by the angel Jibril in the
waters of Zamzam, travels on the back of al-Buraq to Jerusalem, leads
prayer at the Silver Mosque, and ascends from the Rock, as-Sakhra, en-
shrined in the Dome of the Rock upon the Temple Mount. He returns be-
fore the water has finished pouring out of the glass by his bedside that he
had knocked over in his haste to arise before the angel.
Thus the parameters and “machinery” of such narrated dreams had to
be carefully defined by monotheistic authors. Being God, the Holy One
does not appear in dreams simply because one has placed one’s head upon
a holy rock or, ailing, sought to sleep in the temple. He cannot be manip-
ulated in the magicoreligious sense. As we shall see, classical incubation
with all of its components is not only apparently suppressed in the He-
brew Bible, but is also problematized at ancient Christian churches and
Muslim shrines despite its practice at these places and continuation to
this day.
Later I will suggest that there might be a middle path through the strict
polarity of these two theological interpretations of incubation: (1) ritually
“conjuring the god in sleep” as though on demand, and (2) insisting that
God (or the gods) cannot be dreamed about at particular places because
of divine illimitability, that is, that the god only appears in dreams by his
own volition. That path goes by the way of mutual dreaming.
survivals of incubation in monotheism

The Greek notion of physical healing through cultic dreaming flourished
in the shrines of Asklepios and Hygeia in the fifth century b.c.e.; reach-
ing the height of its popularity in the Hellenistic period, the practice
continued in the Eastern Church in Cyprus and Constantinople, survived
up until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy and Australia,
and is apparently widely practiced to this day in modern Greece at the
Cathedral at Tinos and elsewhere.57 In Late Antique Coptic Egypt, one
finds Christian dream cures at the tomb-shrines of saints. In the West, St.
Gregory of Tours, writing in the fifth century c.e., tells of incubations in
the Church of St. Martin of Tours by the saint’s burial place, and dream
cures at the tomb of Saint-Julien de Briourde in France.
Shi‘i and Sufi Islam have a rich history of incubation, initiation, and
transmission of knowledge through dreams; all of these are part of the
larger category of istikhara, as Toufic Fahd has shown.58 Incubation sites
abound at the tombs of marabouts throughout Lebanon and North Africa,
particularly in Morocco, where dream interpretation manuals can be pur-
chased everywhere telling the Muslim how to distinguish between ruya
(God-sent dreams) and a˙lam (deceitful dreams from other sources). Pe-
titioners come to sleep at these tombs and dream dreams of the saints, the
57
For example, in August 2002, Nun Aemiliane of the Monastery of the Elevation of the
Holy Cross in Thebes, Greece, reported to my husband, Bruce Beck, an account of the mi-
raculous dream-healing of severe gangrene suffered by the grandfather of a fellow monastic
of her order, Nun Mariam, a number of years ago. The man slept in a special place within the
sanctuary of the Church of the Holy Unmercenaries Ss. Cosmos and Damian (soldier-doctors
from the period of Roman persecution) in Trikala, about twenty minutes from Meteora in
northern Greece, and was healed by them in a dream. Sr. Mariam’s grandfather visited the
church, which was not his own parish, on foot every Sunday for the rest of his life to express
his gratitude to the saints.
58
Toufic Fahd, s.v. “istikhara,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978),
4:259–60.
friends of God (awliya’ allah), who have special intercessory powers for
those on earth.59
what is at stake?
There is more to this antipathy and tension than the monotheistic insis-
tence on a kind of differentiation from its predecessors. Resistance is not
only about unique identity and religious aesthetics. There are high theo-
logical stakes concerning the very nature of God in the incubation con-
troversy. The monotheistic God, the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Jacob
and Rachel, or the God of Joseph and Mary and Jesus of Nazareth, or the
God of Muhammad and Aisha and Fa†ima, is a God who because of his
omnipotence and omniscience can be cultically worshipped and even sup-
plicated, but ought not to be cultically manipulated; the healing or the
knowledge of the future will be given if God wills it, but not because one
made him produce it in a dream. The ancient practice of incubation fell
uncomfortably into the category of theurgy, of compelling the god to
attend, to appear, to respond. As the book of Job makes clear, God be-
haves as he pleases vis-à-vis humanity, constrained only by covenants
which he himself creates and enters freely, by self-incarnation, or by self-
revelation.
The orthodox monotheist does not wish to imagine a god who can be
compelled to give a dream because one has slept in a particular place.
But incubation is indisputably present in monotheistic scripture nonethe-
less, and it is powerfully present to this day in practice, especially in non-
industrialized nations. Sometimes in monotheistic scripture and written
histories the ritual elements of the phenomenon are obscured or “weak-
ened” in the story to avoid the appearance of magic. Sometimes there is
outright suppression.
The Genesis 28 account of Jacob’s dream may represent such a sup-
pression, wherein Jacob seems by chance to produce a mighty vision in
one of the most famous dream accounts in biblical dream literature.
He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had
set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down
in that place. And he dreamed there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of
it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on
it. And the Lord stood beside him, and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abra-
ham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to
you and your offspring. . . . Know that I am with you and will keep you wher-
ever you go, and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I
have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said,
59
See, among others, the work of Sara Sviri, Benjamin Kilborne, and Toufic Fahd.
“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid
and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of
God, and this is the gate to heaven!” (Gen. 28:11–17)
Notice that the biblical writer is careful to say that Jacob lays down to
sleep at what will become Bethel, the house of God, only because the sun
had set, not because the place is a holy place that can produce dreams.
Ackerman has elegantly suggested that elements of classic incubation are
present from start to finish in the Jacob’s latter account, albeit suppressed
and even rearranged. “At some juncture in its transmission history,” she ar-
gues, “the original cultic context of Gen. 28.10–22 was obscured in favor
of narrative requirements. Once this happened, ritual elements properly
belonging to the incubation rite were freed from their original construct.
In particular, the untasted sacrifice and the skins, no longer bound by cul-
tic constraints, were able to move elsewhere in the epic.”60
One might go even further than Ackerman does, however: theological
concerns, not merely narrative constraints, may be the driving force of
the occultation here; similarly, in the account of Solomon’s incubation in
2 Chron. 1:7 there is no mention of an induced dream, but rather we find
the language of epiphany by night: “God appeared to Solomon and said
to him, ‘Ask what I should give you.’ ”
In thanksgiving for the revelation, Joseph then sets up the stone upon
which he slept as a massebâ and anoints it (Gen. 28:18: “So Jacob rose
early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head
and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it”). As Ackerman
notes, “That is, Jacob offers a libation of oil as a sacrifice.”61 We have al-
ready noted the many parallels to this practice of making a thank-offering
in both the Greek and the ancient Near Eastern incubation accounts. After
the divine dream, one sets up a stone or stone stele; as is customary, Jacob
here anoints the dream-marker.62
In the Christian case, incubated dreams as new or alternative sources of
revelation, unsanctioned and without scriptural authority, seemed to have
become gradually perceived as threatening to established structures of
orthodox interpretation. A manuscript from Coptic Egypt of the fourth to
60
Ackerman, “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” pp. 118–19 passim.
61
Ibid., p. 116.
62
See Ackerman (n. 21 above), pp. 116–17. Among the evidence she presents: In 1 Kings
3.15, Solomon, after his incubation at Gibeon, returns to Jerusalem and offers burnt and
peace offerings; in Canaanite literature, the king Dan’il in the legend of Aqhat (CTA 17.2.24–
38) offers food and drink to the Kotharot, the birth-goddesses “who had arrived at the court
to oversee the conception of the child promised to the king in his dream”; King Kirta, like
Dan’il, is promised a child in his dream, and offers sacrifice immediately upon awakening
(CTA 14.3.154–14.4.171).
fifth centuries c.e., The Miracles of Cyrus and John, now at Duke Uni-
versity, warns, “Scripture [i.e., and only Scripture] is the judge of the
dream.”63 As Guy Stroumsa cogently remarks,
For a Christian dream to be religiously significant, it must come from God. But
since God usually reveals himself in the Canon of Scripture, now closed, a true
Christian dream must remain something of an exception. Christian suspicions
about dreams were enhanced by the very nature of Christian monotheism. . . .
monotheism entails a single legitimate religious authority. The idea of a single
God as well as that of a single bishop implies a single legitimate source of
truth and thus militates against the plurality of valid dreams. The drastic limita-
tion of valid dreams was also a result of the notion of divine transcendence
(and of the world as God’s creation), a notion that impedes easy passage be-
tween the world of humans and the divine realm.64
At the Sunni-controlled shrines of Medina, the same issues identified

by Stroumsa in ancient Christianity are still at play. For example, prayer
at the tomb of the Prophet is strictly curtailed to prayer that is directed
only to Allah himself; hajjis may not pray to the Prophet for intercessory
help, nor may they sleep there and dream dreams of the Prophet. Although
the Prophet is “a mercy to the world” and “the last seal of the prophets,”
he is still in orthodox Islamic theology the vessel that received the reve-
lation of the Qur’an, and is not himself, even after death, an appropriate
locus of devotion. As we have said, the mi‘raj is understood in Sunni
Islam to be a literal, physical journal to heaven, not a dream; the Sufi
claim that Muhammad only dreamed the ascent is seen as degrading the
truth of the theophany and divine instruction he alone witnessed.
a proposed phenomenology of dream incubation

Robert Bosnak, who led a modern dream incubation in the summer of 2002
in the Paleolithic caves of France, poses the question, “Can the spirit of
place affect dreaming?” The experience of deliberate sleeping within the
deep recesses of the caves, which produced, as he rightly noted, “differ-
ent musings—and different dreams—than those of Times Square,” causes
a kind of psychic occupation, he argues, by that energetic entity. “After a
while,” he said, “our heart beats with the spirit of the place.” If the cave
paintings are “a self-confession of the spirit of the bison by way of the
spirit of the painter,” then the same might be said of the incubation pro-
cess. Bosnak wonders whether “the charged environment is dreaming
63
L. S. B. MacCoull, “Dreams, Visions, and Incubation in Coptic Egypt,” Orientalia La-
vaniensia Periodica 22 (1991): 123–31.
64
Guy Stroumsa, “Dreams and Visions in Early Christian Discourse,” in Shulman and
Stroumsa, eds. (n. 7 above), pp. 195–96.
us.”65 Thus the cave-bull, a numinous being, dreams itself though the in-
cubating sleeper, who has created in her intentional sleep a place for it to
once more manifest itself, perhaps after thousands of years of dormancy.
Perhaps the most holistic notion of intentional dreaming in both phys-
ical and metaphysical worlds can be found in the aboriginal “Dreaming”
of Australia: Alcheringa in Aranda, Bugari in LaGrange, Tjukurrpa in
the western desert, and Wirrimanu in far northwestern Australia. T. G. H.
Strehlow, a lifelong anthropologist of central Australian aboriginal re-
ligion, has noted that someone’s Dreaming is located, and totem expe-
rience determined, in the place where the mother experiences her first
symptoms of pregnancy; in that place she often dreams of the child’s to-
tem. A central question in aboriginal culture is, “What is your Dream-
ing?” According to Judith Ryan, “An Aborigine might call the place from
where his or her Spirit came as Dreaming, or refer to his totem as his
Dreaming. The Dreaming also explains the existence of a social or moral
imperative.”66 This link, deeply religious, is also deeply topographical.
W. E. H. Stanner reports that one might typically say of a tree, rocky out-
crop, or a pool, “There is my Dreaming. My father showed me this place
when I was a little boy. His father showed him. He said, ‘Your dream-
ing is there; you want to look after this place; you don’t want to let it go
[forget, be careless about it] it is from the first man [the Dreamtime
heroes].’ ”67
The Australian aboriginal interpretation of the incubation process might
address the theological concerns of the monotheistic canon, and get us
closer to understanding what takes place during incubation. Incubation is
not best understood as theurgy in its most magical sense of performing
ritual steps that compel and harness the limitless deity, that make the god
“hatch dreams” in and for us. It is rather a type of communion, a recip-
rocal activity that is closer to prayer or to sacrifice, with intention and
65
Robert Bosnak, “Cultures of Dreaming” (presidential address, Nineteenth International
Conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams, Tufts University, Medford, Mass.,
June 15, 2002).
66
Judith Ryan, “Aboriginal Art Text,” in Rosemary Crumlin, Images of Religion in Aborig-
inal Art (Kensington, NSW: Bay Books, 1988).
67
W. E. H. Stanner, “Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism,” in Aboriginal Man in Austra-
lia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. P. Elkin, ed. Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine
H. Berndt (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1969), p. 231. Pace the objections of Lévi-Strauss
a few years earlier, Stanner remarks in the same essay that a totemism is “always a mystical
connection, expressed by symbolic devices and maintained by rules, between living persons,
whether as individuals or as groups or as stocks and other existents—their ‘totems’ within an
ontology of life that in Aboriginal understanding depends for order and continuity on main-
taining the identities and associations which exemplify the connection.” On p. 229 he says,
“A totem is an abstract symbol for the possible membership, over all space and time, of the
sets of people symbolized by it—the dead, the living, the unborn.” The totem, and its relation-
ship to the person, are actually brought about by Dreaming as primordial cosmogonic activ-
ity, by dreaming as contemporary activity, and as place (locality) expressed through both.
attention on both sides. One might answer monotheistic objections by

asserting that it is not wrong deliberately to seek such divinely induced
dreams if we can preserve in the quest the uncircumscribed power of the
god.
It is true that in classical (and classic) dream incubation, given all his
individual psychic history as backdrop, the human being offers up a stage
for holy dreams. He “dreams” of the god—he “produces” another world
in the same way that the Upanisadic dreamer produces the lotus pools.
But is the god less real for that, or less powerful? It is just as possible that
at the same time, the goddess is dreaming herself through the dreamer.
By intentionally placing one’s sleeping, purified body at the portal, the
“strong” place of incubation where the heartbeat of the world can be de-
tected, one gives the divine the opportunity to dream itself, to realize it-
self, to synthesize and actualize all that it is. “After a while our hearts
beat with the spirit of a place”—and after a while, that spirit of place
may dream itself through our idiosyncratic night journeys. The highly re-
ligiously determined place of incubation may provide an opening—or an
outlet—where, through dreams, the divine, das Heilige, can realize itself
more transparently, just as Visnu, sleeping as he floats upon the infinite
ocean, dreams the cosmos into existence.
Although incubated dreams certainly do not “belong” to human beings
any more than any other dreams do, they are far from impersonal. For our
part, we are far from passive receptacles for the self-expression of the gods
through dreaming. We contribute to the incubation a delicate yet power-
ful web of experience, memory, will, fear, awe, and desire where the di-
vine dream can take place. When the spirit of place hatches dreams through
mortals, it also dreams about us and for us as individuals, as a tribe, and
as a race.
Thus the process of incubation, viewed through this phenomenology—
or constructive historical theology—emerges neither as conjuring magic
(whereby the dreamer is all powerful) nor as a kind of slavery to the night
terrors sent by a celestial despot (whereby the visiting dreamed god is all
powerful), but instead as a delicate relationship, as paradoxical and sym-
biotic as any other two-sided affair. For millennia, human beings have
sought the gods by sleeping in special places. The gods have freely re-
sponded as they chose by sending dreams whose purposes range from
beneficial healing to dire warning.68
68
It will be obvious to the reader that this proposed phenomenology works without apol-
ogy from the premise that the powers that animate incubated dreams may be objectively real,
however culturally determined, until proven otherwise. The grounds for the philosophical
validity of this method versus, or at least in rapprochement with, an approach that assumes
de facto and without question that all religious experience is socially or psychologically gen-
erated, are laid out in my essay, “Juggling Torches: Why We Still Need Comparative Religion,”
Mutual dreaming is not a new idea. As Wendy Doniger has remarked,

it is an idea that is certainly as old as Chuang Tzu’s famous dream of the
butterfly. She reminds us that it appears in countless medieval Hindu tales,
and in Alice in Wonderland (in Alice’s dream of the Red King), and in
the work of Miguel de Unamuno: “I say that we are a dream of God. God
is dreaming us and woe to that day when he awakes! God is dreaming. It
is better not to think of that, but continue to dream that God is dreaming.”69
In a neo-Kantian intellectual world where religious and psychic expe-
rience of any type is seen as a readily decoded human construct rather
than as a response to metaphysical reality, it may be necessary to empha-
size the divine role in historical and contemporary dream incubation. This
too might be a kind of “rectification of the category.” The telling of both
sides is imperative: gods and human beings are the cocreators of dreams
in the darkness of our mutual sleep. Incubated dreams around the world
spread new wings in the heat and light of this encounter.
Harvard Divinity School
in A Magic Still Dwells, ed. Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), pp. 205–38. I believe that it is time to stop debating this question
and to start asking what the application of such a method might look like. This is what I be-
gin to attempt here.
69
Miguel Unamuno, in a letter to Walter Starkie, October 1921; cited by Doniger (O’Fla-
herty) in Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities (n. 35 above), p. 250 and n. 96.

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Kimberley C.

Dream incubation represents a rich nexus of cognitive, performative, loc-

ç 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

a venue for epiphany, supernatural remedy, divination, revelation, or

One Line Long

My older daughter and I once stood transﬁxed before a large Plexiglas-

a tradition theorized by Lee Irwin in his study of nineteenth-century Plains

One Line Long

cubations, no matter how elaborated their symbolic expression, usually

religious scholarship once they begin to drift and multiply; comparative

ism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,14 Mircea Eliade made the mastery of

invariably comprised three elements, enacted in this particular order:

tuary of Ptah’s temple, weeping and bewailing his fate.”23 Herodotus

waybil shrines of the Maya; or they can be a combination of both, as in

While it can be a natural place, the site of classical incubation is most

the rectiﬁcation of categories

in the strong interest in classiﬁcation inherited from philosophical phe-

not incubating. But if I sleep intentionally in a holy place and a cucumber

modern examples of “true” or “classical”

We have, for example, attestation of a continuous practice of incuba-

Sita Lakshmi . . . was obliged to dedicate herself entirely to the service of

Teillard goes on to comment that the interpretation of Sita Lakshmi’s

Preston’s research also encompassed more extreme cases, calling for

In some cases serious diseases like syphylis, gonorrhea, or leprosy (considered to

the consequences of incubation

which can be interpreted by a “religious man in touch with the deity.”51

the theology of incubation: monotheistic tensions

manifest violations: “The Phoenicians sacriﬁce their children; Israelites

survivals of incubation in monotheism

At the Sunni-controlled shrines of Medina, the same issues identiﬁed

a proposed phenomenology of dream incubation

attention on both sides. One might answer monotheistic objections by

Mutual dreaming is not a new idea. As Wendy Doniger has remarked,

Harvard Divinity School

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