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.