Sleeping with the Gods

In January 2025, I wrote a question on a piece of paper and slid it under my pillow: How can I resolve my anger outbursts?

A grown-ass man with certifications in Jungian coaching and dreamwork, tucking a note under his pillow like a kid leaves a tooth for the tooth fairy. But dream incubation (asking your unconscious a specific question before sleep) is one of the oldest healing practices humans have ever devised (assuming humans devised it in the first place). And I keep doing it because it works, even when the answers aren’t what I expect.

That night, I dreamed I was standing in a forest at dawn. Beams of sunlight cut through the canopy. In front of me: a massive tree, possibly a sequoia, already cut down. A two-man saw was propped against the stump.

That was it. No drama, no chase scene, no dead relatives delivering cryptic monologues. Just a forest, a stump, and a saw that takes two people to operate.

The sequoia (majestic, reddish-brown, something I’ve never seen in person but have always found striking) had been felled. By whom? The saw was a two-man tool. I remembered using one in Boy Scouts; the teeth were dull, and it took real effort. Nothing about it was quick or clean.

If the tree represented my anger — this massive, rooted, alive thing — then someone had already helped me cut it down. Or maybe the tree wasn’t the anger at all. Maybe it was the vitality I’d been severing. Maybe my anger outbursts weren’t the disease; they were the symptom of something essential being removed. And the two-man saw meant I wasn’t doing it alone; perhaps, an unconscious part of my psyche was helping me sabotage myself.

I’d asked how to resolve my anger. Instead of handing me a fix, the dream acted like a coach, looking at the dilemma from a different angle. It was as if the dream were asking me to consider: What if the anger isn’t the problem?

The Greeks Had a Building for This

Three thousand years before I shoved a note under my pillow, the Greeks built entire temple complexes (Asklepieia) dedicated to the same idea. You showed up sick, injured, or lost. You bathed. You fasted. You made an offering to Asclepius, the god of healing. Then you slept in a sacred chamber called the abaton, holding your question or prayer in mind, and waited for the god to visit you in a dream.

Temple priests interpreted what came through. Sometimes the dream prescribed a treatment. Sometimes the dream was the treatment; it restored whatever spiritual imbalance had manifested as a physical affliction. According to inscriptions at Epidaurus, these dreams were said to relieve more than symptoms—they could change your fate.

I think about this whenever someone tells me dreams are “just your brain processing the day.” The Greeks built temples for this. The Egyptians wrote instruction manuals. Cultures across the world developed specific rituals for calling in healing dreams. To me, this suggests these are not merely folk superstitions, or obscure esoterica, but systematic practices with preparation, intention, and interpretation built in.

We forgot all of that. Somewhere between Plato and Netflix, we decided the night was for recovery at best and wasted time at worst. We stretch our waking hours until they snap, choosing one more episode over the thing that might actually help: our dreams. Heraclitus had it right twenty-five hundred years ago: “The waking have one world in common; sleepers turn aside each into a world of their own.” We’ve been avoiding that private world as if it were a load of laundry to be folded or a sink full of dirty dishes.

How to Ask

Dream incubation isn’t complicated. What it requires is the same thing the Greeks signaled with their fasting and offerings: intention.

Here’s the version that doesn’t require a temple.

Start by getting honest about what you’re actually asking. Not the surface question, the real one. “Should I take this job?” might really be “What am I afraid will happen if I stay?” My anger question felt straightforward, but the dream suggested I might be asking the wrong question entirely.

Write it down. Something shifts when the question moves from spinning in your head to sitting on paper. It doesn’t have to be fancy; a torn piece of paper will do. Write it the way you’d ask a friend.

Before sleep, reflect on the question. You don’t have to obsess over it; just let it be part of your awareness as you drift to sleep. Some people visualize it; I just read the card a few times and put it under my pillow. The Greeks bathed and made offerings; your version might be an Epsom salt bath, turning off screens an hour early, or reading something that matters to you instead of doomscrolling. The point isn’t the ritual, it’s how you choose to signal to your unconscious that you’re paying attention.

Then catch whatever comes. It might not arrive on the first night. When I incubated a question during my training at the Institute for Dream Studies: show me a guiding image for my time here — I had a dream about playing golf in Spain at midnight with a broken watch. Not exactly a clear directive. But the confusion in that dream, the sense of being in a beautiful place while anxiously calculating whether I’d make it back in time, told me something important about how I was approaching the program: one foot in, one foot already trying to figure out the next thing.

Even fragments count. A feeling counts. Write it down before you reach for your phone. If you remember nothing, write that: I didn’t recall a dream, but I know I dreamed, and I’m listening. The act of showing up for the dream, consistently, patiently, is what opens the channel.

The Night Is Not Wasted Time

Freud thought dreams restored psychic balance by fulfilling wishes we couldn’t admit to while awake. Jung saw them as compensatory, the unconscious correcting for whatever our waking attitude had gotten wrong. Both agreed on one thing: the dream is working on something, whether you participate or not.

The difference between letting your dreams run unattended and practicing incubation is the difference between overhearing a conversation and joining it. You’re not attempting to control what the unconscious says. You’re telling it you’re listening, and willing to act.

The Greeks slept in temples. You have a pillow and a pen. The practice is the same: ask a real question, prepare yourself to receive, and trust that the night has something to offer besides rest.

What question have you been carrying that your waking mind can’t seem to answer? Write it down tonight. Put it somewhere you’ll see it before you close your eyes. And pay attention to what comes. Not just the first night, but over the week that follows.

Your dreams are already working on something. You might as well find out what.