The dreamgates open paths to spontaneous healing. This was the shared wisdom of the ancient world. It calls to us again, in our dreams, to move beyond our fixation with physical symptoms to the spiritual causes of wellness and illness. It invites us to draw on transpersonal energies to heal ourselves and others.

Pilgrims came from all over the ancient Mediterranean world to the temples of of Asklepios, the man-god who personified healing.

They came here to dream. Asklepios is, beyond all else, the Dream Healer. When you enter the precinct of Asklepios, if you are fortunate, you will have a dream experience that will be more than diagnosis or prognosis; the dream will be the healing.

You take in the plays and processions and sleep in a guesthouse for the first night, hoping for a preparatory dream — a dream that may qualify you for the big one. You are bathed in the sea and smudged with incense.

You make offerings and are admitted to the temple of Asklepios, where you view images of the god. You ask him for the gift of a healing dream. If you have doubts about what is possible here, you may be reassured by the evidence of dream healings that have happened here before: votive stelae and tablets line the walls, thanking the god for the use of an eye, a leg, a kidney, a heart.

You look down and see the coiling shapes of the yellowish white snakes that are the mascots of Asklepios. You feed them with honey cakes.

You are ready to dream. You dress in white, for holy sleep. You go to the abaton, the “forbidden dormitory,” with other dreamers and are given the simplest bedding, a pallet on the stone floor.

The priest calls for the presence of the god. What, exactly, is he evoking? The word Asklepios, according to Robert Graves, means “unceasingly gentle.” His birth is miraculous: the mating of god and human. He is the son of Apollo by the Crow-maiden, Coronis. He was exposed at birth and left for dead, but was suckled by a dog and a she-goat. He heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, and calls the dead back to life. His mentor in healing is Chiron, the centaur, the model of the wounded healer. He knows that poison is also medicine; he uses Gorgon’s blood, the gift of Athena, to heal minds and bodies.

He heals in the manner of the shamans. Soul retrieval is one of his specialties. He is so successful in bringing back souls from the Land of the Dead that Hades complains about him to Zeus. Zeus hurls a thunderbolt at him and does not miss his target. In dying as a man, Asklepios becomes a god. Relenting, Zeus raises him to live with the immortals and sets his caduceus among the stars. He continues to exercise his healing influence among humans. And even among the stars, his strongest connection is still with the primal energies of Earth and sexuality. He is god and man, but he is also a snake.

Asklepios is believed to reveal himself to those who seek his aid. One of the Christian Fathers, Origen, conceded that “a vast multitude have frequently seen, and still see, no mere phantom, but Asklepios himself, healing and doing good and foretelling the future.”

Now he has been called, you are instructed to remain silent and fear nothing that may transpire during the night.

“Dream now, and dream of the god of healing who will come to you in the night.”

Who knows what will come? If you go by the accounts of previous dreamers at this shrine, a dog may come to lick you. A huge serpent may come, testing your courage as well as your willingness to accept the healing. Asklepios not only has snakes as mascots, he is known to shape-shift into snake-form himself. Maybe your dream visitor will be a beautiful young woman, one of the daughters of Asklepios; their names are Hygeia and Panecea. Or the god himself, in human or transhuman guise.

At the start of some of my residential workshops, I have people come down to our gathering space dressed as they would normally dress for bed. I get them to lie down in a cartwheel formation, heads facing in toward the center. “Dream now…” I chant the words over and over to lead them into sacred sleep.

We can practice dream incubation at any time and place in our lives. It is especially powerful when done with the drama and energy of a simple group ritual in a special place. However, the fundamental journey of healing is not the journey to a sacred site. It is the journey to the hidden orders of reality where dis-ease and healing have their source. The distance between you and that sacred source may be inconceivably vast or a fair hike or no distance at all, depending on your courage and imagination.

Adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.