Our age is entranced by the hints and possibilities encoded in dreams. Rapt and eager, we attend the modern priests of the subconscious, the analysts and therapists; eagerly, we sit at their feet, lie on their couches, flashing their interpretations as beacons to illumine our depths.
We are convinced that the secrets of our inner lives, the hidden byways of our childhoods and our troubled yearnings are all clearly addressed in our dreams, if only we had the key to unlock their hidden secrets. Dreams have fascinated throughout the ages. In antiquity, philosophers and magicians made a great art of the interpretation of dreams. The Babylonians composed a book of dreams, listing which dreams had which meanings ("If you see a cat crossing your path...").
The Egyptians, the Greeks and others focused on the dream as a guide to what the fates held in store for the hapless sleeper. Dreaming was understood to be the portal of communication to a higher world.
In the modern age, the two great dons of dreaming are William James and Sigmund Freud. James sees the subconscious as the bridge connecting the physical world, accessible through our senses, and the realm of the sacred. Dreams, for James, represent a secret message from a higher order of being. In articulating that theory, James was recapitulating the consensus of mankind throughout antiquity and the middle ages. In a break with that inherited tradition, Sigmund Freud insists that dreams reveal, not the future, but the past. Dreams represent the efforts of the human mind to make sense of its own experience, to meet the unmet needs of the heart. "We dream," says Freud, "because, while awake, we can get no satisfaction."
Jewish tradition has also paid homage to the dream. One of the great dream stories in the Torah is that of Joseph in jail. Imprisoned falsely, he wins his freedom by artfully interpreting the dreams of two Egyptian prisoners, correctly predicting which one would be released and restored to his former employment.
According the Rabbi Hisda (7th Century Babylon), "a dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read." Joseph, because of his spiritual rigor, was the only one capable of deciphering the message of the dream. The sages of the Talmud, Rabbi Hisda among them, recognize that dreams do reveal something about the character of the person who is dreaming, not only something about the future. They know that there is no exact correspondence between the future and a dream. ("While a part of a dream may be fulfilled, the whole of it is never fulfilled.")
Rabbi Hisda goes even further, suggesting that perhaps the significance of the dream lies in its contents itself, not in any possible predictive powers. "The sadness caused by a bad dream is sufficient for it, and the joy which a good dream gives is sufficient for it."
The Rabbis of the Talmud were united in the understanding that dreams possess a power to prompt introspection and to provide new insight into human behavior and its consequences. For that reason, a bad dream was more highly esteemed because it could inspire repentance and self-improvement. Our own age differs from the rabbinic estimate of dreams in two regards. Our experts discount the possibility that dreams reveal the future, and they similarly remove any moral element from dreams and their interpretation.
But we may well ask, even granting that the subject matter and raw material of dreams is our own experience, longings, disappointments and urges, doesn't that lead to night-thoughts about how we want the future to work out? Isn't wish-fulfillment possible to attain only in the future?
In that sense, then, dreams do speak of our tomorrows, alerting us to our own unresolved conflicts and their desired resolution. How we treat those aspirations, and how we align our behavior to our needs -- whether in a way that increases human dignity and our own, or in a way that reduces ourselves and our contemporaries to pleasure machines -- is very much a matter of ethics. And with that insight, we can join our ancient sages in their sincere prayer to God. "Turn our dreams into blessings."
Shabbat Shalom.