SACRED DREAMS

 

He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top ascended to the sky and the angels of God were going up and down on it. – Genesis 28:13

Like angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder, dreams link heaven and earth, the physical and the cosmic. Dreams, the language of the soul, the voice of the Divine, open a sacred space to connect with God.

Dreams and dream allusions fill our prayerbooks, Torah, Talmud, and Kabbalah, but in modern Judaism, dreams are a neglected part of our heritage.

Prayer and deeds of loving kindness are established practices, and meditation is a rediscovered tradition of Jewish spirituality. Yet, our religious institutions have lost appreciation of dreams as an entrance to holiness.

The Talmud, rabbinic teachings of Jewish law, contains a dream manual (Brakhot 55a-57b). The Torah illumines the importance of dreams. Throughout, God appears in dreams and visions to prophets and kings: to Abimelech (king of Gerar) in “a dream of the night,” to Israel “in visions of the night,” to Moses in “a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.”

In the Torah, Joseph translates Pharaoh’s dreams of plenty and famine, leading to a public policy that saves the Egyptians from starvation. King Nebuchadnezzar suffers the physical and emotional toil of defying the will of God as imparted to him in a dream. God, in dreams, grants King Solomon the gift of wisdom.

In Numbers, “If there is a prophet among you, I, God, do make Myself known unto him in a vision, I do speak with him in a dream.”

Readings in Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayer Book crystallize facets of dreams:

“I find You in the marvels of Your creative might. In visions in Your Temple/In dreams that bless the night.”

“Grant, O Eternal God, that we may lie down in peace, and raise us up, O Sovereign, to life renewed. Spread over us the shelter of Your peace, guide us with Your good counsel, and for Your name’s sake, be our Help.” 

 “Trust in God* with all thy heart and lean not unto thine own understanding; in all thy ways acknowledge God and (God) will direct thy paths.” 

 God, Source, Guide, Presence, Spirit—it matters not what we call the force; it only matters we connect.

Yet, in Judaism today, the guiding, protective, and healing aspects of dreams are forgotten. Prominent Jewish spiritual centers list Torah study and meditation as paths to Jewish wisdom and a relationship with God but omit dreaming as a mystical mode. Sisterhoods sponsor bridge tournaments, Mah Jongg games, and yoga classes, but dream circles are rare. 

JASD embraces dream awareness as a fundamental pillar of Jewish spirituality and spiritual practice for all.

For me, dreams are the language of the soul, the voice of the Divine

Dreams emanate from the soul. We often use the terms “brain” and “mind” interchangeably.  To clarify, the brain is composed of gray and white nerves filling the cranium. The brain facilitates thinking, feeling, and reflective processes.  The mind is our soul, our psyche, our inner sense of being.  The mind is our soul, our psyche. Its action arm: the imagination.

Neshamah, Hebrew for breath, also means soul.

The Talmud sages teach upon awakening, a person should say, “Elohai neshamah shenatata bi tehorah,” “My God, the soul you have placed within me is pure.” (Berakhot 60b)

                   A BRIEF HISTORY OF SACRED DREAMS

Dreams are integral to ancient religions. Dreams are found in the holy books of the major monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

Some assert the supreme writings of the three Abrahamic creeds are literal truths. For me, the Bible and the Qur’an, along with their dream narratives, serve as metaphorical manuals for the growth of the soul and expanded awareness. 

Early

The Epic of Gilgamesh, dating back to around 2000 BCE, is possibly the oldest work of literature. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (modern-day Iraq), part god and part man, dreamt of terrifying times filled with falling mountains, storms, wild bulls, and a fire-breathing thunderbird. 

An impending flood, a gliding garden serpent, the beast-like Enkidu, and vivid god-sent dreams read like precursors of the biblical Garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, and Nebuchadnezzar’s madness.  

Rooted in pre-historic Mongolia, the shaman is the intermediary between the physical and the WORD. Shamanism presumes the soul departs the body to retrieve wisdom. The shaman intervenes, mending a traumatized soul and guiding it back to the body, through dreams and visions.

 Aboriginals, indigenous Australians, believe ancestral spirits formed the world during what they call Dreamtime. Their creation myth exalts a place beyond linear time where past, present, and future merge. The legend holds spirits from “time out of time” enter the other universe, bonding with all things by way of dreams, altered states, or death.  

 Surprisingly, dreams are integral to the ancient health-care system of Chinese medicine. The earliest recorded medical discussion about dreams is found in The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic (Huangdi Neijing). The book of internal medicine, written around 2000 BCE, cites dreams as a diagnostic tool. Just as shamanic followers trace transit of the soul, the Chinese believe the soul leaves the body at night for the dream world. They fear the soul might fail to return if the sleeper wakes suddenly.   

 The ancient civilizations of the Greeks and Romans deemed their dreams prophetic, filled with warning messages of illness sent from gods and goddesses. Three thousand years ago, priests were healer-physicians, diagnosing and treating patients at medical school-hospital-temple hybrids by listening to their dreams. In the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle speculated dreams arose from the soul countering the prevailing mythology dreams were god-sent. The Greeks viewed the soul belonging to the realm of the divine, infinite, and eternal, and the body to the realm of the material, finite, and mortal.

 Tibetan Queen Māyā, asleep in her palace, dreamed four devas (spirits) carried her to Lake Anotatta in the Himalayas, A white elephant, symbol of greatness, appeared. It held in its trunk a white lotus flower, symbol of enlightenment. The dream foretold the birth of a son, who would become a great monarch or an enlightened teacher. In 563 BCE in a park in what is now southern Nepal, Queen Māyā gave birth to Siddhartha, who became the spiritual leader Gautama Buddha. His illumined teachings are the foundation of Buddhism.

Holy Books

 By the fourth century BCE, Babylonians and Assyrians, living along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—the region eloquently known as the cradle of civilization—had vanquished fragments of a polytheistic past. In their religious texts, dreams emanated from a singular god. 

 Dozens of dreams fill the Old and New Testaments. Angels and trances and voices and spirits and visions—siblings of nighttime dreams—grace nearly every page, delivering God’s guidance and  prophecy. Dreams in biblical tales occurred in sacred places or the places were sacred because a divine revelation occurred there.

Dreams steer individuals and guide nations toward (or away from) their destinies, disclosing the divine plan for humankind. Some assert the supreme writings of the three Abrahamic creeds are literal truths. For me, the Bible and its dream narratives are metaphorical manuals for growth of the soul and expanded awareness.

 Jacob’s dream, a mystical occurrence beautifully told in Genesis, is an allegory of the two-way communication dreams tender between God and humankind. Like the angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder, dreams link the heaven and the earth, the cosmic and the physical.  

Jacob’s dream, a mystical occurrence beautifully told in Genesis, is an allegory of the two-way communication dreams tender between God and humankind. One night, Jacob, traveling to Haran to find a wife, put a stone under his head and slipped into sleep. Like angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder, dreams link heaven and earth, the cosmic and the physical. 

(See intro for more references in Jewish liturgy)

 In the New Testament, the angel Gabriel visited Mary and divulged she would bear the Son of God: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

After he learned of the pending birth, Joseph thought about deserting Mary, his betrothed, but the “angel of the Lord” came forth in a dream and convinced the reluctant Joseph to wed Mary.

The story of the birth of Jesus is related through five dreams in the biblical books of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament.

The night Jesus was born in a Bethlehem stable an angel appeared to shepherds in a nearby field. The angel announced the birth of the Messiah and described where to find Him. After visiting the baby, the Wise Men dreamt  King Herod intended to harm Jesus. In three dreams, angels told Joseph how to keep Jesus safe.

A dream birthed another biblical narrative. Around 95 AD, a heavenly figure emerged in a dream to John of Patmos on the Aegean Island where he lived. The dream directed him to record his visions. Stars and dragons, seals and a leopard-like beast, dense numerology, and apocalyptic scenarios became Revelation.

The final book of the Christian Bible tells the sensational stories of the Four Horsemen and the Second Coming of Christ.

 The Gospel of Mary, a Gnostic book found at the end of the nineteenth century, relates the backstory of the mother of Jesus: Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim, were married fifty years when they conceived Mary, their only child. They shared the same dream about their daughter on the same night from different locations, a process of mutual dreaming or dream telepathy called Lamonitiamityous. Like two souls conjoining, they dreamed the name of their daughter would be Mary, and when she was 14, she would know a rare conception. After the dream, Mary’s spirit entered Anna. 

 Dreams are also intricate to the holy books and teachings of Islam. Muhammad, a shepherd and merchant, was meditating in a cave near Mecca when the angel Gabriel appeared to him in a dream. The angel announced to the future prophet and founder of Islam, “O Muhammad, you are the messenger of Allah.” From 610 CE, when Muhammad was nearly 40 until his death 23 years later, the angel in dreams and visions imparted the Qur’an, regarded by Muslims to be the word of God.

Dreams foretold the course of the female Muslim saint,  Rābia al-Basri. After she was born in Basra, Iraq, in 717, Muhammad appeared to her father in a dream, saying, “Your newly born daughter is a favorite of the Lord, and shall lead many Muslims to the right path.” Al-Basri is credited with founding Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam. ”  

The religious importance of dreams devolved during the Middle Ages in Europe, from the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century to the beginning of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. To institutionalize their power, religious leaders, including Judaism, fearful congregants attuned to their dreams might challenge church doctrine, tarnished dreams as divination or demon-sent.

However, dreams and other sacred practices fomented in subterranean chambers in the 12th and 13th centuries. The mystical parts of religion—Sufism in Islam, Shaivism in Hinduism, Kabbalah in Judaism, and mystical theology in Christianity—led to or grew out of the traditional. 

 Mysticism, derived from the Greek mystikos, is an awareness of an ultimate reality, a spiritual truth. Mysticism connotes an awareness of a universal God, a divine consciousness. Worshippers communicate directly with God, bypassing prescriptive texts and religious dogma, jumping the firewall between supplicant and priest. 

 Mystics believe a person foresees events in dreams because the soul transcends to a high/er spiritual level. The twelfth-century physician, philosopher, and jurist Moses Maimonides, the Jewish Aristotle, believed dreams arose from the imagination and ingredients of prophecy and revelation.

Descartes and After

In the 16th century in Ulm, Bavaria. Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician, had three confusing dreams. filled with sound and fury. Eventually, he decided the third dreams pointed to “the unification and the illumination of the whole of science, even the whole of knowledge, by one and the same method, the method of reason.” The application of Descartes’ principles led to a dualistic conception of mind and body, influencing Western medicine and religion for three centuries.

 From the mid-1600s, reason reigned over the mystical. The inexplicable aspects of religion and medicine integral to flourishing societies for many thousands of years diminished, nearly disappearing. In the eighteenth century, scientific rather than spiritual explanations for human behavior were glorified. The emphasis on the natural sciences undermined belief in the supernatural.

Psychic Healers

 As societies transitioned to the Industrial Age, dreams survived outside mainstream science and beyond traditional religion. Psychic healers drew dreams from the shadows of the Cartesians, converting sacred practices into social movements. 

 Most notably was Edgar Cayce, a medical intuitive born in 1872 on a farm in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. From the time he was 21, for a half-century, Cayce gave nearly 15,000 psychic readings—diagnosing illnesses, exposing past lives, and offering prophecies—  often by interpreting the dreams of his patients while he was in a meditative state. Cayce, known as the father of holistic medicine, connected his mind with “all time and space,” what he called universal Consciousness.

 Christian Scientists shun medicine and mind cures. In their view, people are spiritual beings, a reflection of God, and, therefore whole. Christian Scientists view human existence as sleep or a dream from which “mortals must awake to become conscious of man’s spiritual identity and dominion as the child of God.”

 In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist, and Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, fixed dreams at the fulcrum of the treatment of neurotic and psychotic behavior.  Freud, Jewish and an atheist, did not link dreams to the holy, which he regarded as an illusion. Jung, son of a pastor, also avoided a metaphysical, stand-alone realm.

 Psychoanalytic jargon such as therapeutic dream analysis replaced the ordinary vocabulary of dream interpretation intimidating casual dreamers and inhibiting the notion dreams play an essential role in our everyday life. The scientific proofs of the Cartesians and the psychoanalytic emphasis on dreams as a therapy to treat neurosis and psychosis of the mind, have interfered with the concept of dreams proffering guidance for all of us.

 Most critically, Descartes delegating care of the body to medicine and care of the soul to religion, and the psychoanalysts sending care of the mind to psychology contributed to the desperate state of health care today. 

       WHY EMBRACE DREAM AWARENESS

Dreams strengthen the spiritual seeker and houses of worship, nurture personal growth, and empower communities. JASD aims to re-instill an appreciation of dreams in synagogue services and in individual and communal Jewish life by teaching about the power of dreams to guide, heal, and transform..

JASD explores the potential for Jewish and faith communities to share dreams and draws upon the positive insights and actions resulting from attending to our dreams.