Dream On!

December 5, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

Scientists reckon that in an average American lifetime, you spend about three years dreaming. They base this figure on studies of brain activity during hours of sleep. Of course, sleeping is not the only time when we dream. A lot of us spend a lot of time dreaming during the day, too. For some people, in some professions, day dreaming is an apt description of their everyday activity. For others, mentally sneaking into a day dream takes the edge off repetitive or non-productive hours in the day. Day dreaming goes by a large number of names. We call it visualization, planning, research and development, designing, creating, and strategizing. All these are part of everyone's working day and so we not only get in three years of night-time dreaming in a lifetime, but many years of day-time dreaming, too.

Not every dream leaves you with a gift or a message, of course. But almost everyone has had the experience of a dream that does surprise or shock or dismay or delight. You may wake up in a sweat from some dream, or wake up to a feeling of indescribable well-being from another. One dream may give you the answer to a problem you have been facing; another may bewilder you or nag at you until you begin to understand it.

The reason for this is that dreams are not literal and they are not linear and they do not reveal themselves in a sequential or logical manner. They are impressionistic and abstract; they speak in pictures instead of words, in spurts of actions instead of trains of thought, in characters instead of sentences. When you wake up from a strong dream, you may be able to tell it in a few words or you may need to tell it in great detail. And, once you have told it, you may understand it completely in an intuitive way or it may confound your understanding and force you to confront it.

So the dream is not a full experience. It can become a full experience if it is nurtured properly, if it is handled with care, and if it can be made to yield to insights. Edison was able to visualize the electric light before anyone could have imagined cartooning him with a light bulb above his head, and Marconi visualized that radio waves could be sent across great distances before anyone had the equipment to prove he was correct, and Einstein could speak about a relative universe only after he had a dream about falling in an elevator. Our dreams can be keys to our futures, but not without some effort to turn them into realities. To put it another way, as the talmudic Rabbi Hisda used to say, "A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which has not been read" [Berahot, 55a].

I like to think of dreams as "d-mail." If only you read your d-mail, you could delve into yourself more deeply, study your feelings, grasp your intuitions, get a grip on your personality, your desires, your relationships to friends, to the world, to Judaism, and even to God. Unfortunately, alarm clocks jar us out of sleep and most often we leave for the day's work without reading our d-mail. And, it is in the nature of dreams that, when they go unread, they tend to slip out of memory.

Almost all of us are aware of this famous dream that we read from the Torah tonight. Jacob dreamt of a staircase to heaven, populated by beings of a divine nature who are called malachim, a word that may be translated as "angels," but also means "messengers." That is the whole picture and it is told in the Bible in a few brief words, a few verses of Torah. The rest of the story is about listening to the dream, interpreting the message. Jacob finds God in the dream, speaking to him. The dream is dramatic and concise. "Behold!" it says, again and again.

Behold the staircase! Behold the messengers going up and down! Behold God standing beside me whispering in my ear! Behold how unique this place and this time are! Behold how many answers can come in a single dream!

So let me pose just one "Behold" for you. Behold! You wake up each morning. What do you share over that first cup of coffee? Do you ask your children or your spouse, "What did you dream?" Do you dare to enter into a conversation about what your dreams mean or what their dreams mean?

Consider what we typically ask young people. "What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do with the rest of your life?" Do we really mean to limit their imaginations to what they wish to major in at college? Or should we be asking about their dreams -- their nightly dreams and their daily dreams, for all of us remember one or the other of these. Shouldn't we be asking young people -- and asking one another, too--"What kind of a person do you want to be?" "How will you live your life in relation to others?" "What do you imagine that God requires of you?" "What is your dream for a better future for you and for us all?"

These are the essential questions that should be uppermost in our minds, especially now in a time when people feel stressed. Out there, maybe in you, maybe in someone in your family, maybe in some friend, there are the stirrings of new ideas, of new paths, of new visions, of new dreams. Maybe if we could share these paths and these dreams we could see our way to changing the world radically. Our dreams could enable us to transform the world the way Einstein and Edison and Marconi and a thousand others from Coco Chanel to J. K. Rowling transformed the world for us. It's because we listened to their dreams that our world changes. So let's share our dreams, let's share our deepest imaginings for the good of all. Dreams are one source of energy that cannot ever become too expensive or too scarce.

The story is told of a rabbi who fell asleep and dreamed that he went to paradise. There, he was surprised to see all the sages gathered -- Moses, Aaron, Miriam, Akiba, Hillel, Beruriah, and Solomon -- and they were discussing the Torah.

He was amazed. He turned to an angel and said, "Behold! This is the very same thing that the sages were doing on earth! Can this really be paradise?"

The angel replied, "You human beings can be so foolish. You cannot tell what you are looking at even as you see it. You dream of paradise and think the sages are in it. But the truth is just the opposite. Paradise is in the sages."

The next great advance, whether it be in science and technology or in human kindness and religious awareness, is never out there somewhere. Our dreams of paradise out there are the real fantasies. The paradise we are really seeking is always "in here!" "in us!" Our dreams and our imaginations are the greatest resource we have and the only resource that truly ensures our future. So start sharing and do not stop sharing. Dream on! And let us say: Amen.