Written on December 15, 2024

Over 4000 years ago, there were temples in Egypt that we now retrospectively call sleep temples, or dream temples. These temples were hospitals of sorts, which cured a variety of ailments, most of them psychological in nature.

Patients were taken to an unlit room to sleep and be treated for their particular ailment. The treatment consisted of singing chants, putting the patient into a hypnotic state and analyzing their dreams to determine the treatment. Meditation, fasting, bathing and offerings to the spirits were also often involved.

Such temples also existed in the Middle East, Rome and Greece. In Greece, these temples were called Asclepieions. The Greek treatment is called incubation. Incubation was later adopted by Greek Christians and is still used in a few Greek monasteries.

For as long as I can remember, I have had difficulty with breathing and restlessness. And over the years, through having to try so hard to achieve a state of calm and tranquility, I have discovered that achieving a state of calm and tranquility is the single most important way to heal your body and mind.

Almost everything in life affects your nervous system. What you drink, what you eat, how much you move during the day, how much sleep you get each night and the way you breathe. Shallow, panicked breathing causes just that, panic. While deep, slow breathing gives you a sense of calm.

I would have loved it if temple sleeping was still a common thing. But luckily we don't need temples to achieve the effects they achieved all those years ago. By reading about their methods, we can continue these age-old healing methods in our own time.