Where Dreams May Come: Incubation Sanctuaries in the Greco-Roman World

That Gil Renberg can preface his weighty two-volume study of incubation in the ancient world with a note that it developed as a side project to two other books he is writing (also on dreams in antiquity) demonstrates the richness of the topic of ancient dreaming and its relative recent neglect in scholarship. In Where Dreams May Come, Renberg examines incubation -the practice of sleeping in a deity's sanctuary in order to receive a god-sent dream -in the Ancient Near East, the Ancient Greek world, Pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt, and Late Antique Christianity. His focus lies squarely on Greece and Egypt, whereas the Ancient Near East comes in to play primarily in the search for the origin of incubation and Late Antiquity makes an appearance only in two appendices. The work is a thorough and masterful study which adds significantly to our understanding of incubation and raises questions regarding what this practice can tell us more broadly about divination, religion, and medicine in the ancient world.