Dream incubation: falling asleep with a question

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The last sovereign territory. You enter through the plants, through silence, through a return to the dreams of the elders.

Short answer. To incubate a dream is to fall asleep with a question and hand it to the night. The word comes from the Latin incubare, to lie down in a place: the Greeks slept in a god's sanctuary to receive an answer. In the evening, a question and a notebook are enough, with a cup of mugwort or Calea if you wish.

Sleeping in the god's house

At Epidaurus, Athens, Pergamon and Kos, people spent the night with Asclepius; at Oropos, with Amphiaraos. Ritual purity and sacrifices came before sleep, offerings after the night (Renberg, 2017).

At Pergamon, visitors rested, prayed and bathed in the spring. At night the priests led them into the abaton, onto a ritual bed, among non-venomous snakes. In the morning, they told the priests their dream. Aelius Aristides kept a dream diary there, the Sacred Tales (Bulkeley, 2016).

Gil Renberg distinguishes two kinds of incubation. The kind that asks for a remedy was practised at only a minority of cult sites. The kind that asks for an answer is older and more widespread, and often local. And the practice arose in the Near East, before Egypt and Greece. In Mesopotamia, people dreamt in reed huts (Moss, 2020). In the first centuries AD, people came to sleep at the sources of the Seine, with the goddess Sequana (Moss, 2010).

Rites elsewhere

Kimberley Patton reduces these rites to three elements: an intention, a place set apart (a mountain, a cave, a graveyard), an answer (cited by Bulkeley, 2016).

The Muslim istikhara goes back to the sayings of the Prophet. Ablutions, prayer, then you lie down on your right side, your right hand at your ear, repeating the name of Allah until sleep comes. A medieval Jewish text describes the she'elat chalom, the dream question: you sleep on your left side, write your question down and slip it under the pillow (Bulkeley, 2016).

Among the Sioux, people fast for four days and four nights in a pit, "crying for a dream" (Lame Deer and Erdoes, 1972). In Australia, at Port Jackson, Colonel Collins reported in 1798 that one became a medicine man by sleeping on a grave (Eliade, 1964).

A leaf, a root

Among the Chontal of Oaxaca, Calea serves to receive in a dream the cause of an illness, or news of a person far away or lost (Díaz, 1979; Mayagoitia et al., 1986). Among Xhosa diviners, Undlela Ziimlophe and the other ubulawu help the novice remember the dreams in which the ancestors speak (Sobiecki, 2012). We tell both stories in our guide to the dream herbs.

In Colombia, Kamsá shamans drink a tea of Desfontainia when they want to dream, to recognise an illness (Schultes et al., 2001; Rätsch, 2005).

In the laboratory

In 1993 Deirdre Barrett asked students to choose a problem and incubate it every evening, for up to a week. Some of the dreams dealt with the problem, and outside judges found some of the solutions useful. In 2020, at MIT, the Dormio device repeated a theme at sleep onset to steer dreams towards it; a follow-up study of 50 people linked this incubation to better scores on three creativity tests (Haar Horowitz et al., 2020).

This work is about dream content and creativity. It says nothing about plants.

The evening gesture

1. A few lines on the subject, without trying to solve it, then a one-line question, handwritten in a notebook, under tomorrow's date. The more specific it is, the more specific the dream (Delaney, 1988 and 1998).
2. If you wish, a cup half an hour before bed: a teaspoon of mugwort as a light tea, or about 2 g of Calea, 3 minutes. Calea is taken over 3 to 5 nights, then a break.
3. The question one last time, as you fall asleep. The paper can go under the pillow, as with the dream question.
4. On waking, before you move, a few words in the notebook. One image is enough.
5. The same question on the following nights, for up to a week, as in Barrett's study.

Sources

• Renberg G.H. (2017). Where Dreams May Come: Incubation Sanctuaries in the Greco-Roman World. 2 vols. Brill, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 184.
• Nutzman M. (2019). Review of Renberg (2017). Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2019.01.41.
• Barrett D. (1993). The "committee of sleep": a study of dream incubation for problem solving. Dreaming 3(2):115-122.
• Haar Horowitz A., Cunningham T.J., Maes P., Stickgold R. (2020). Dormio: a targeted dream incubation device. Consciousness and Cognition 83:102938.
• MIT News (21 July 2020). For the follow-up study of 50 people.
• Díaz J.L. (1979). Ethnopharmacology and taxonomy of Mexican psychodysleptic plants. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11:71-101.
• Mayagoitia L., Díaz J.L., Contreras C.M. (1986). Psychopharmacologic analysis of an alleged oneirogenic plant: Calea zacatechichi. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 18:229-243. PMID 3821139.
• Sobiecki J.F. (2012). Psychoactive ubulawu spiritual medicines and healing dynamics in the initiation process of southern Bantu diviners. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 44(3):216-223.
• Bulkeley K. (2016). Big Dreams. Cites Patton K. (2004) and Covitz J. (1990).
• Moss R. (2010). Dreamgates; (2020). Growing Big Dreams.
• Delaney G. (1988). Living Your Dreams; (1998). All About Dreams.
• Lame Deer J., Erdoes R. (1972). Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions.
• Eliade M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
• Schultes R.E., Hofmann A., Rätsch C. (2001). Plants of the Gods. 2nd ed.
• Rätsch C. (2005). The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants. Park Street Press.

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