Incubation was the central rite of the Epidaurus sanctuary: a sick pilgrim who had made the required offerings entered the abaton, a long stoa reserved for sleeping, and lay down among strangers to wait for a dream. Asclepius was expected to appear in the vision himself, or to send one of the sanctuary's tame, non-venomous snakes to lick or touch the affected part, and a priest interpreted whatever the sleeper reported the next morning. The practice, called enkoimesis, treated the dream itself as the therapeutic event rather than as a symbol requiring separate treatment. Some inscriptions describe patients waking already cured, others record instructions to be carried out afterward, such as a specific diet or a course of exercise.
The sanctuary staff inscribed a selection of these cures on stone tablets called iamata, several of which survive. They range from the plausible, a woman's difficult labor resolved after a dream visitation, to the frankly impossible, a man's severed hand made whole again, set down without any apparent distinction in register between them. Modern historians of medicine read the collection as promotional literature curated by the priesthood rather than a clinical record, while noting that Epidaurus also practiced procedures recognizable as ancient surgery and pharmacology alongside the incubation rite. What combination of suggestion, rest, and the hygienic regime imposed on visitors accounts for any given reported cure is not something the tablets themselves settle, and the sanctuary's own theology made no such separation between divine and physical causes.