ABSTRACT
Dr Kimberley Patton, professor at Harvard Divinity School, in a paper she presented at the 2002 international conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams in Boston,34 gives us some of the most famous examples in classical western incubation history, and the birth of clinical practice:
. . . at the shrine of Asklepios in the great long abaton of Epidauros where the bearded compassionate god, perhaps in the form of a great snake, appeared to the dreamers asleep on their klinai to prescribe remedies, or the one at Cos where in dreams he wiped away disease with his hand, or the mysterious round building at Pergamon in Asia Minor with its cut channels for purifying water to run through the healing chambers, where, according to the account of the Hellenistic orator and hypochondriac Aelius Aristides, once the god came in a dream and ``prescribed that the very bones and nerves of a sufferer's body must be pulled out and then put back.'' But they must not simply be replaced, new for old. Instead, there had to be a ``certain change of those existing, and thus there was need of a great and strange correction'' (Aelius Aristides).
