Dreams

A dream is a story or image that a person sees and experiences in his sleep. The dream registers in consciousness as something a person sees, and sometimes also as something he hears and touches. The dream appears without the person having any ability to choose it, and without his having any ability to control its course. Thus a person sometimes experiences a nightmare in his dream without being able to change it for the better. Sometimes a person sees himself in his dream doing terrible things, without his power of judgment being able to choose to prevent it. True, sometimes the nightmare stops when the person wakes from his dream in terror, but he was unable to change the course of the story in his dream for the better.

Apparently most dreams are forgotten, and a person remembers only dreams he dreamt close to waking, or that left such an imprint on his soul that they caused him to wake up. And even these he usually forgets a short time after waking from sleep; only those that left an especially great impression on him does he remember even several hours later. However, people who are accustomed to attributing importance to their dreams remember even dreams that others perceive as meaningless and forget in the blink of an eye. Therefore, in times and places where people tended to attribute great importance to their dreams as predictors of the future or revealers of hidden things, people remembered their dreams more, and would turn to dream interpreters to decipher for them what they had seen in their dream.

Dreams stem from various sources. There are dreams about which the Sages said (Berakhot 55b): “A person is shown only what comes from the thoughts of his heart.” As they related about the king of Persia who turned to the Amora Shmuel and said: “You claim that you are very wise; tell me what I will see in my dream tonight.” He answered him: “You will see that your enemies the Romans take you captive, and you work for them at hard labor, grinding date pits in golden mills.” He thought about this all day, and at night he saw it in his dream (ibid. 56a). One may not foretell the future on the basis of such dreams, and so it is stated (Zekharya 10:2): “For the terafim (idols) have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and they speak false dreams; they comfort in vain.”

And there are dreams about which the Sages said (Berakhot 55b) that the dream has a supernal source and is a kind of prophecy, as it is stated (Bamidbar 12:6): “I speak with him in a dream.” The Sages further said (Berakhot 57a) that a dream contains one-sixtieth of prophecy. And the Sages said (Zohar I 238a): “At first, prophecy rested upon human beings... Once prophecy ceased from them, they would make use of a bat kol (heavenly voice). Now prophecy has ceased and the bat kol has ceased, and people make use only of dreams.” Indeed, even in our times there are stories of people who saw in their dream what was going to happen to them, and sometimes they were warned in a dream to flee from a disaster that was about to befall them, and thanks to the dream they were saved.^¹