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In Our Dreams

Vayetzei 5777 / 10 December 2016

December 14, 2016

I have a great wife. Every year, around the High Holy Days, she gets me a post-holiday present — sometimes it’s an actual item, like a fuzzy sweater or a CD; other times it’s an activity, a concert or an outing somewhere. Part of the fun, although I’m not sure it reflects well on me, is that every year I forget that she does this and then I’m surprised all over again. This year, I knew she had cooked up something unique because she was practically giddy with excitement and couldn’t wait for me to open the gift. I was definitely caught off guard when I discovered that this year’s present was a gift certificate… for a 90-minute floatation session in a sensory-deprivation tank.

For those of you who haven’t seen Stranger Things, a sensory-deprivation tank is basically a completely enclosed, soundproof, pitch-black bathtub with about six inches of warm water and 800 pounds of epsom salts. The salt allows your body to float on the water’s surface — just like at the Dead Sea, for those who have had that experience — while the warmth, darkness, and quiet remove other sensory stimuli. In theory, a session in one of these tanks helps a person relax, meditate, and relieve stress. I was pretty sure I was going to completely freak out.

In the end, it turned out to be a great experience, one that I find hard to describe because it is so completely unlike anything else. I can’t say for sure how long it took me to stop wondering how much longer I would be in the tank — obviously there wasn’t a clock inside, and anyway it was so utterly dark I couldn’t see my own hands if I held them up. Eventually, however, I relaxed into the experience, at which point the really interesting things began. Immediately afterward, I recalled sleeping through some portion of the time, but looking back I’m less and less sure if I was sleeping or if I’m remembering it that way because, asleep or not, I dreamed.

This morning’s parshah is unusually self-contained. By the end of the Torah reading, we find Jacob essentially back where he started: on the border of the Land of Israel, returning home along much the same route he took twenty years earlier in his escape from Esau’s rage. The first half of Jacob’s adulthood — encompassing the beginning of his work life, as Harry spoke about earlier; his marriages, in all their complexity; and the births of all his children — takes place within a hermetically sealed bubble. Our story opens on a young man, single and rootless, and concludes with a wealthy, mature, established head of a family — but all of this growth and development takes place outside the Land of Israel, in Laban’s world rather than in the central context of our Biblical stories. The Torah’s narrative reinforces this separation between parashat Vayetze and the rest of Jacob’s tale by bringing back several key elements of the beginning again at the end. Among these features, the most obvious and perhaps most important are Jacob’s dreams. On his way to Haran he sees a vision of the ladder spanning Heaven and Earth;[1] and toward the end a dream vision calls him to take his wives and children and return home.[2] 

We have entered the dream time. The coming week brings us to the middle of the Hebrew month of Kislev, which Sefer Yetzirah — the oldest book of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism — associates with the power of sleep.[3] We often experience a dip in conscious energy at this time of year, a slowing and quieting; it can be a reflective time, a period to look backward and forward, a time of rest before the new growth of spring. Sleep holds a power over the human imagination, perhaps because it is at once intimately familiar — one of the few truly universal human experiences — and at the same time mysterious and foreign. In sleep we enter the realm of dreams, territory so obscure that we must still admit to Freud’s observation that “in spite of many thousands of years of effort, the scientific understanding of dreams has made very little advance.”[4] 

What are dreams, and what end do they serve? The daunting scale of the question, the odds against our arriving at a definitive answer, should not deter us from at least entering the conversation. The Talmud describes dreams as 1/60 of prophecy: a distant approximation of divine revelation.[5] Dreams, of course, depend on sleep to shift us from ordered, conceptual thought to open-ended, associative images.[6] Sleep, in turn, appears in the same Talmudic passage as a 1/60 approximation of death.[7] When we connect the dots, our Sages suggest that dreams — which ordinarily happen only during sleep — seem to belong to another plane of existence altogether. Paradoxically, our dreams remove us from the world we recognize while simultaneously opening to us a more expansive, flexible realm — a taste, 1/60, of transcendence.

Part of our problem arises from the ambiguous relationship between waking life and the dream space. Our dreams very clearly draw on the events, thoughts, and emotions of our conscious self;[8] and yet the dream lens presents a vision of our lives through a fun-house mirror, distorted and dislocated.[9] In dreams we find a version of life that is strange, unreal even, without becoming completely alien. We experience dreams in this way because images and sensory experiences replace the cognitive and verbal structures that define our ordinary thought processes.[10] Rather than thinking about our dreams, we experience the dreams in precisely the same ways we experience waking life. Dream experiences, for all their strangeness, feel just as real as conscious life; only upon waking do we become aware of having dreamed.[11] The Torah shares this insight into the nature of dreams: for Jacob, our hero, both dreams come as vivid, life-like images,[12] while Laban — the story’s antagonist, if not an outright villain — dreams only of a verbal message,[13] drawing a hierarchy of significance between his experience and Jacob’s.

Our dreams transport us to a landscape of contradictions and collisions. “Dreams scarcely ever take over ordered recollections from waking life, but only details selected from them,” Freud writes, “Thus dream-compositions find no place in the company of the psychical sequences with which the mind is filled.”[14] Despite working with the same mental material, dreams rarely prove consistent with our waking thoughts and memories. No matter how vivid or intense the dream, we can nevertheless distinguish its residue from actual memory. The paradox of dreams — realistic, and yet, at least in retrospect, manifestly not real — leaves us with a Rabbinic tradition that asserts, without any sense of irony, that “All dreams contain some truth”[15] and “There is no dream without some nonsense.”[16] We can not take our dreams at face value, nor can we dismiss them out of hand. Instead, from the dawn of civilization to the advent of psychology and neuroscience, we have sought to make sense of this strange world we visit every night.

“A dream not interpreted,” says the Talmudic sage Rav Hisda, “Is like a letter left unread.”[17] The dream itself can not help us; it remains at once too much and still not enough. In a handbook to dream interpretation first published in 1515, the kabbalist Rabbi Shlomo Almoli writes that “A dream can bring awareness only after it has been interpreted; otherwise the dream is meaningless and as though it had not been dreamed.”[18] Presented with Jacob’s vivid dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder, every commentary on the Torah takes a crack at interpreting its meaning.[19] And yet the sheer number of proposed readings reveals the profound difficulty inherent in dream interpretation. Almoli, anticipating Freud, suggests that proper interpretation demands a refined combination of creative imagination and specific knowledge of the dreamer’s life and circumstances.[20] Two people may see the same images in a dream, and yet the dream will not hold the same meaning for each.

I offer a personal example to illustrate the flexibility of dream images: one Friday night during my second year of rabbinical school, I dreamed that one of my sisters died; in the dream I tore k’riyah and sat shiva for her. In the morning I woke up profoundly disturbed and, instead of going to my regular minyan, headed for the Modern Orthodox synagogue where I knew I would find my teacher Reb Mimi. After the service, when I shared my dream, I was shocked to hear her immediately declare that such a dream was an omen of long life for the person. The content of the dream seemed so unambiguous to me; and yet Reb Mimi suggested that the dream was like a photographic negative, in which a bride under the huppah wears black.[21] It would seem that dreams are not “positive” or “negative” of their own accord, but rather on account of the significance we assign to them. Indeed, the Talmud says as much when it declares that “The dream follows its interpretation.”[22] We might suggest that a dream is less a mirror, reflecting our lives, than a screen upon which we project our anxieties and hopes.

Our dreams transport us to a place that is 1/60 of death, a world apart from ordinary reality in which horizons shift and rules become malleable; a place that is 1/60 of prophecy, where amid the inevitable nonsense we might find deep, essential truth. In this way our dreams set us free; they liberate us from the constraints of our awakened existence – what we think of as “reality” – and bring us to a realm of limitless possibility. In that dreamscape we have access to our full potential, we encounter all the possible directions for our life at once.[23] From this vantage point, dreams push us to imagine, even to expect, things that go beyond the reality on the ground. Herein lies the root of our associating “dreams” with “hopes” and “aspirations.” When we hear Dr. Martin Luther King declare, “I have a dream,” does anyone imagine he saw such a thing in his sleep? No! And yet the word “dream” perfectly captures the message he hopes to convey in a vision that is simultaneously completely outside his lived reality, and yet wholly possible. We can look around us, fifty years later, and see where his dream has emerged into our conscious reality, and where it remains in the dream space. And yet even those parts of his dream that remain unfulfilled still hold enough plausibility — enough reality — that we still feel the allure of Dr. King’s invitation to dream with him.

We describe our longing and aspiration in terms of dreams in part because of the effort it takes for us to keep those hopes in focus. Just as the dreams of the night dissolve with the dawn, and are remembered only partially,[24] the same can happen to our dreams for the future. Thus when the poet Langston Hughes asks us to consider, “What happens to a dream deferred?”[25] he speaks on many levels at once — of the lived experience of waking from a dream, and the struggle to carry on in the face of frustrated aspirations. In another paradox, however, even as most dreams fade away a few persist with such intensity they can feel even stronger than our waking memories.[26] This quality of dreaming infuses King’s “dream” with a durability and longevity that enables his words to resonate today just as powerfully as when he first brought his dream to the world.

In Vayetze — going out, heading to new and unexplored places — we find a parshah framed by its hero’s dreams. It reminds us of a dream’s power to stir us to action, whether inspired by possibility, like Dr. King, or driven by the frustrated hopes Hughes writes about, and often by both at once. This month of sleep, the dream time, invites us to engage our inherent possibilities. The world-weary charge to “be realistic” finds no place in the world of dreams; on the contrary, when we dream, the multitude of possibilities becomes the reality. In our embrace of those possibilities we find the inherent ultimate truth in the dream, the 1/60 of prophecy offered by our encounter with an altogether different world. Our dreams, in every sense of the word, call to us: Vayetze, go out, seek and explore, open to what we will find.


[1]        Gen. 28:12-15.

[2]        Gen. 31:10-13.

[3]        Sefer Yetzirah 5.9.

[4]        Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text, tr. and ed. James Strachey (1955; repr. New York: Basic Books, 2010), 35; cf. ibid., 71-72.

[5]        Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 57b; cf. Shelomo Almoli, Pitron Halomot [Hebrew], tr. and annotated by Yaakov Elman as Dream Interpretation from Classical Jewish Sources, (New York: Ktav, 1998), 13; Freud, Dreams, 36, 54.

[6]        Freud, Dreams, 78-80.

[7]        Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 57b.

[8]        Freud, Dreams, 41-42, 70; cf. Berakhot 55b; Almoli, Dream Interpretation, 25. Of special importance is the Jewish sources’ contention that a dream that reflects conscious thought is merely an echo of waking life without significance of its own (Berakhot 57a; Almoli, Dream Interpretation, 25).

[9]        Freud, Dreams, 41, 71. Rava’s contention that a person does not dream about “a golden palm tree [or] an elephant going through the eye of a needle” (Berakhot 55b) — images that are not merely disordered but patently impossible — seems to overreach; Freud’s recounting of a dream in which children sprout wings and fly away (271) is sufficient to challenge the Talmud’s claim.

[10]        Freud, Dreams, 78-79.

[11]        Freud, Dreams, 79-81.

[12]        Gen. 28:12-15, 31:11-13.

[13]        Gen. 31:24.

[14]        Freud, Dreams, 75; cf. ibid., 53.

[15]        Bereshit Rabbah, Vayetze 68.12

[16]        Berakhot 55a.

[17]        Berakhot 55a.

[18]        Almoli, Dream Interpretation, 51-52.

[19]        Abravnael, in his commentary, presents a comprehensive digest of the theories offered through the 15th century.

[20]        Almoli, Dream Interpretation, 6; cf. Freud, Dreams, 121-125.

[21]        It is a useful contrast to note that Freud classifies a dream of a sibling’s death as “typical,” but reads it with the grain as an indication of latent hostility or rivalry preserved from childhood (267-273).

[22]        Berakhot 55b-56a.

[23]        In light of Freud’s comments on the warped sense of morality common in dreams (93-101), it is worth observing that we indeed find all potential self-expressions, not only the positive ones.

[24]        Freud, Dreams, 73; Almoli, Dream Interpretation, 14.

[25]        Langston Hughes, “Harlem.”

[26]        Freud, Dreams, 73; Almoli, Dream Interpretation, 14.

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