According to many people Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis and especially
dream interpretation. And of course his student Carl Jung also is attributed to the father
of dream analysis. But if we really look closely we see that
three - three and a half thousand years before Freud and Jung, Yoseph, Jospeh, was the great
dream interpreter. And if we look in the torah, we see that there
are actually ten dreams mentioned in the Chumash, in the 5 books of Moses, which is a lot of
dreams for a relatively small book. So that tells us how important dreams were in Jewish
tradition, and how much honor and importance people put to them.
Some of these dreams are the most famous stories in the Torah. Joseph and his dreams, and Pharaoh
and his dreams that Joseph comes and interprets. And perhaps the most famous of them all is
the dream of Jacob and the ladder. Throughout the prophets more dreams are mentioned,
and we're even told that many times the prophets received their prophecy in dreams or in a
dream-like state. So therefore the idea of dreams is not a modern,
meaning dream analysis, is not a modern invention but it has its roots deep in the torah.
Even more than that, if we look in the Talmud, we see an amazing array of opinions as to
what are the meaning of dreams. And if we go through the various opinions, and I write
about this extensively in my book The Mystical Meaning of Dreams, there seems to be contradicting
views of what dreams are. Anywhere from dreams are prophetic to dreams are nonsense, and
everything in between. So we would ask, well which opinion is right?
The way we learn in Judaism in general and especially the Talmud is that these views
are not really contradicting each other at all, they are giving us different aspects
of what dreams are. And so therefore there are certain dreams
that are ridiculous, and there are some dreams that are messages from God. And there are
dreams that tell us about our deepest potential, our deepest fears and hopes. Some dreams come
from what we eat and drink. And therefore we can actually construct what we'll call
a ladder of dreams. Just like Jacob's dream, he saw angels going from above to below and
below to above, they were going on the rungs of the ladder, if we analyze it carefully,
we see that different levels of the soul will manifest different types of dreams. Therefore
the more animal soul is more connected to if we over eat or drink or if someone take
drugs or has gone through an operation and is very drugged up. It will affect in a major
way the type of dreams we're having. In other words the body itself produces the image of
the dreams. We have other dreams that the talmud says
explicitly just like modern psychology says, that dreams review what happens to us during
the day. But its the subconscious and the unconscious that is playing back, in symbolic
terms, its take of what our life is going through.
And then there are type of dreams where we try to solve our problems and therefore we
dream about what is bothering us and we get messages in our dreams of how we can actually
fix this. And then there are dreams that connect us
to our deepest potential and our mission in life. And here we bordering actually on prophecy.
And then the highest level of dreams is when God actually sends us a message through sometimes
angels or God Himself is giving us a message. And many many people have experienced dreaming
about something and then it comes true, and this is a very startling thing.
So we see that dreams emanate from different parts of the soul, from our emotional state,
our psychological state, our soul state, our body, and therefore produces all kinds of
different dreams. And its fascinating to see how modern psychology
mirrors the opinions in the Talmud and the various stories in the Torah.