Restoring the Dream Temples
INCUBATIO is guiding the modern world back to Dream Incubation: the ancient art of dreaming for creativity, clarity & soul alignment.
“Counsel me this very night truthfully and with the power of memory.”
– Pre-dream prayer, 5th century Incubation Temples
There is a place one can visit each night, where the wind whispers ancient wisdom and everyone speaks the language of Myth. Pigs fly and Chimeras play chess with the stars. Creativity flows and problems shape-shift into new solutions. Genius lands on shoulders, Psyche sips tea with her shadow, and Mnemosyne tends to the gardens of Recollection. Here, we feast on the answers of the Universe and swim in the sea of everything that ever was. The Golden Threads of Fate swirl through the air, promising to guide us into aligned lives of creativity, balance, health, and wholeness… if we are wise enough to listen, and bold enough to embark on the adventures they have planned for us.
Would you like to visit? Lie down, set an intention, and close your eyes. This is the Dreamworld: the liminal land between your conscious and subconscious.
Accessing your Imaginal abilities through the Dreamworld is not as esoteric or ungrounded as it may sound to the modern ear. Dreaming is, in fact, a remarkably embodied practice – one that has been used by artists, scientists, athletes, and innovators throughout history to create beyond that which currently exists.
Paul McCartney dreamt the lyrics of Yesterday. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity came to him through a dream. Mary Shelley imagined Frankenstein. The Surrealists used dream images to create from the rich space between dreaming and reality (‘a kind of absolute reality — a surreality,’ Breton calls it in his Manifesto of Surrealism). And 72 of 83 recently surveyed Nobel laureates, lauded for contributions in fields ranging from medicine to literature, credit their success to intuition. Dreams reconnect us to just that: our inner navigational systems.
Dreams are cheat-codes for clarity and powerful vehicles for problem solving. And modern research is proving what dedicated dreamers have known forever: inspiration and answers to complex questions of logic frequently arrive in our dreams.
But before Dali napped in an armchair, using his “slumber with a key” technique to mine the Dreamworld for artistic inspiration, the ancient Greeks used Dream Incubation for its foundational purpose: medical diagnosis and holistic healing.
From 5 BCE to 300 CE, the ancient Greeks built Dream Incubation Temples along the Aegean Sea – dedicated to the healing god Asklepion.
Incubatio (ἐγκοίμησις in Greek) – literally “a sleeping within” – is the ancient divination practice of sleeping inside a sanctuary to receive a message from the healing god Asklepion, who they believed would grant them access to the Dreamworld, and guide them into creativity, clarity, wholeness, and power.
The Asklepion Temples were centers for cultivating a sound body, mind, spirit, and soul – in a time just before these elements were divorced into different domains. These sprawling dream campuses were sanctuaries for holistic healing, precursors to the modern hospital, and the unlikely foundation of Western medicine.
Seeking balance and answers, temple-goers took part in radical pre-dream purification rituals, carved questions & intentions for Asklepion into stone, and entered a sacred sleeping chamber. Wrapped in linen and lying upon exquisite marble slabs, they awaited Asklepion and his medicinal messages.
Temple physicians, known as Asklepiads, used the symbols and messages revealed in a patient’s dream to administer treatment, which incorporated a combination of medical practices (herbal remedies, dietary advice, baths, massages, and sometimes surgical interventions) with prayer, meditation, and dream interpretation – as spiritual healing was still considered integral to physical well-being.
The temples were unprecedented sites of personal power, as the Dreamworld granted served spoonfuls of universal wisdom to all who visited. Naturally, the rulers of the time considered this wellspring of inner agency, in the hands of common dreamers, to be dangerous.
By 300 CE, all of the Asklepion Temples had been destroyed.
The original temples lay in ruin, but the Dreamworld still exists.
Thanks to Jungian psychology and modern science, we now know that Asklepion is a symbol for the Self: our subconscious speaking to us through dreams. And that Self is whispering to us constantly – through dreams, desires, and imagination. The Dreamworld is simply where we go when we look within. Dozing off with intention, yielding to a vivid daydream, or indulging a Whim are all points of entry.
Somewhere along the way, however, the world has lost touch with the art of Dreaming.
We spend one third of our lives sleeping, dreaming every time we doze (whether we recall it or not), but most of us forget to listen (or simply don’t know how). Each morning, we discard the personalized gems of wisdom that are coded in our dreams. We rush into hurried lives, and ignore all the ways our Imagination calls out to us during the day. As we tune out our dreams & desires, what we are really doing is turning off our inner GPS; our intuition. No wonder so many feel lost or lacking today.
The ruins of the original Asklepion Temples dot the Aegean Sea: monuments to a time when creativity, imagination, and beauty were keys to becoming whole and well. It was from this divine rubble that the idea for INCUBATIO sprung forth.
Visiting the Asklepion temple ruins with her family in 2021, our founder Sarah was struck by the resonance of this ancient healing practice. A filmmaker and documentary producer, Sarah was drained from climbing “achievement mountain,” disappointed by the view at the peak, and struggling with health challenges that, ironically, sprung from the same actions that brought her creative success. Success, as defined by awards, accolades, and external measuring sticks.
The ancient art of Dream Incubation promised an alternative approach to the Creative Life. An Oracular tradition – in which the Oracle is revealed to be you. A living blueprint coded in each of us, and accessed from within.
As Sarah researched the layered history of Dream Incubation, the personal resonance of these practices grew into a collective imperative to remember them. “If ever there was a time and place to reconnect with imagination,” Dr. Stephen Aizenstat writes in The Imagination Matrix, “That place is here and that time is now. Humanity stands at a crossroads. Your [imagination-fueled] contribution could help to tip the balance to propel humanity forward.”
What had the ancient Greeks gotten right, Sarah wondered, about the true source of creativity, clarity, and wellbeing? Could a resurrection of Dream Incubation practices guide us back to the Creative Life? What would happen if we began to listen to the whispers within? Would the scales really tip and solutions really appear? And how does one who has forgotten… begin to remember?
Something was lost when the temples were torn down.
Without the pomp of a pilgrimage, the salubrious beauty of the Aegean environment, and the elaborate theatrics of the temples… the entrance to the Dreamworld is not as obvious, as “real,” or as seemingly worthy of our attention and expression.
We struggle to give our dreams and desires the space and stillness they need to become real, concrete things. The noise of the Waking World drowns the Self out, day after day. Logic blocks us from the magic & healing that lies beyond rational belief.
So, we created INCUBATIO to revive the lost art of Dream Incubation.
You can dream from anywhere, without a temple or tools. But, to enter sacred stillness, and travel into the deepest realms of your dreams…
…it helps to set the stage.
We no longer wait for Asklepion to grant us access to the Dreamworld, or Asklepiads to translate what we discover there. But there are other reasons so many made the long trip to the temples. Principles which remain vital to Incubation practices today.
The ancients knew that:
Beauty and environment matter. The Aegean was an intentional choice. Its sea, sand, and sky were thought to catalyze the healing process upon first encounter. Beautiful linens, oils, music, and herbs were believed to to do the same.
The noise of the Waking World often drowns out what the gods (*our Subconscious) have to say. To hear, you must clear the channel every day.
Incubation is a 24-hour practice, an all-day art. It requires stillness, ritual, and rest – but also community, creativity, and catharsis through the arts. Visitors danced, dined, and visited the temple amphitheater between dreaming sessions.
To heal or change in divine ways, you must move “beyond belief.” Symbols of Asklepion (his serpent, his staff, his figure) swirled around these ancient dreaming campuses, enlivening the mythology around this Greek god of healing, and encouraging temple-goers to set aside the rational skepticism of the day, and open themselves up to healing through divine intervention or mysterious means.
Creativity is letting the Soul express itself, every single day, through the everyday. Our whole lives are the art-form. Voltaire wrote, “One must feel beauty and be moved by it.” When you tap into the endless stream of the psyche’s wisdom, you become the embodied creator of your one wild, precious life.
Guided by these lost Asklepion principles, we are restoring two gathering places as modern Dream Temples – a creative center on the island of Bozcaada, Turkey & an experiential space Ojai, CA – where beauty, stillness, ritual, intention, imagination, and delight will reign supreme.
As our doors open, we will gather dreamers, artists, thinkers, and friends for immersions, residencies, and workshops inside these spaces. We will share tools for striking up a conversation with your Subconscious and collectively revise our (individual & universal) mythologies.
From these temples, and the Dreamworld they grant access to, we are designing luxury product lines for your home, inviting you to build your own Dream Temple, wherever you rest and revel. After all…
We incubate, in order to create from clarity. We dream, in order to translate those dreams into concrete delights. We surrender a third of our lives to dreams, in order to become whole. And to become whole, to become itself, is the Soul’s deepest desire.
Follow along as we restore the Dream Temple.
Our restoration process is a delight-driven adventure, reconnecting us to the power of beauty, desire, and authentic taste. We sincerely believe that paint swatches, Turkish tiles, and vintage treasure hunting can unlock codes of clarity in each of us.
But when we talk about “Restoring the Dream Temple,” we also mean….
Weaving ancient dreaming practices with science-backed strategies.
Embarking on the grand adventure of discovering our true tastes, indulging our whims, and following our fancies.
Striking up a conversation with our Subconscious (and one another) about what we desire most deeply.
Redefining a “Creative Life” as the courage to create (our homes, our lives, our rituals, our work) from the endless inspiration that springs from within.
Subscribe to SEMPOZYUM on Substack and follow along @incubatio_.