At this point in the cycle, the weekly parashot have been focused on the story of Joseph. It is a great story—rich, layered, and enduring. It was even adapted into a Broadway production (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), and I have yet to meet a rabbi who can preach through these weeks without at least breaking out into song, if not threatening a full dance number.
Joseph’s story in Genesis is the obvious anchor for Abrahamic approaches to dreams. His dreams reveal his own destiny, the fates of the baker and the butler, and eventually the future of Egypt itself. Dreams in this narrative are not decorative or symbolic flourishes; they are structural. History bends around them.
Yet Joseph is hardly alone.
Jacob dreams of a ladder—its rungs bridging heaven and earth, its messengers ascending and descending—at a moment when he is fleeing, vulnerable, and unmoored. Daniel receives visions of statues and beasts, empires rising and collapsing long before they appear on any map. Another Joseph dreams repeatedly—of Mary, of danger, of flight and return—and becomes the quiet guardian of a story far larger than himself. Peter’s vision at Joppa overturns centuries of boundary-making in a single, unsettling moment. Muhammad receives True Dreams before revelation itself, dreams that prepare, warn, and reassure—followed by visions of entering Mecca that unfold only after disappointment and delay.
Across these accounts, certain patterns emerge with striking consistency:
- Dreams initiate; they do not conclude.
- They warn before disaster rather than explain it afterward.
- They disrupt comfort far more often than they confirm it.
- Interpretation is rare—and dangerous in the wrong hands.
- The dreamer is seldom the sole beneficiary.
Dreams appear when waking authority proves insufficient. Kings receive them and do not understand them. Prisoners receive them and are ignored. Shepherds receive them and hesitate. Prophets receive them and suffer for it.
Again and again, the message is the same: when reason, power, and certainty reach their limits, something else breaks through—uninvited, uncompromising, and impossible to unsee.
What and Why?
These are the questions. Just what, exactly, are dreams? Why do we have them?
Science tells us that dreams are the subconscious renderings of the day—a means to an end, allowing us to sort through new information, interpret it, and assimilate it into the larger puzzle of our lives. There is no higher meaning here, no divine origin; it is simply how we process experience. Psychologists, likewise, look at dreams as windows into the inner workings of their patients—a way to glimpse what lies behind the walls we raise in defense of our frail psyches.
But is that really the case? Could it possibly be so simple?
Beyond religion, most people attempt to interpret their dreams, especially what they might portend.
There is a long tradition of sensitives who not only interpret the dreams of others, but regard them as a form of divination. Dreams are said to foretell events—sometimes for oneself, sometimes for others, and sometimes for the world at large. Abraham Lincoln is famously said to have dreamed of a corpse lying in the White House. When he asked a soldier who had died, he was told, “The President.” Just days later, Lincoln was assassinated. Carl Jung, likewise, dreamed of an immense flood covering Europe, mountains rising to protect Switzerland, and yellow waves carrying drowned bodies and the debris of civilization as the sea turned to blood—shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.
Jung used dreams as an integral part of his therapeutic approach. He estimated that he analyzed no fewer than 80,000 dreams over the course of his career. He believed dreams were neither random nor lies, but communications from layers of the psyche inaccessible to the conscious mind. Dreams teach, expand, and redirect. He rejected the idea that this symbol always meant that symbol; there is no mechanical key to dream interpretation. Instead, Jung distinguished between personal symbols—drawn from individual experience—and archetypal symbols emerging from the collective unconscious.
Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is key to understanding his perspective on dreams. He proposed a deep, shared layer of the human psyche containing universal patterns and symbols—archetypes. It is a reservoir of ancestral experience. Here one finds the shadow, the wise old man, the child, descent into darkness, and ascent toward light. These symbols are not learned, but inherited structures of meaning present in us all.
This does not, however, rule out the divine. In fact, it may be more supportive of the concept of the divine than even the most profound religious texts. For Jung, the divine is not so much an external deity as an archetypal reality within the human psyche. He viewed God as a necessary and powerful psychic function—a central archetype of the collective unconscious—accessible through spiritual experience and symbol. Seen this way, traditional religious ideas are transformed into an inward journey of self-realization and connection to something greater than the ego.
Alternate Realities?
Dream walking—nothing new to indigenous cultures throughout the world, yet the stuff of modern sci-fi classics.
At its simplest, dream walking refers to the experience of moving with awareness inside the dream state. Not merely observing a dream as it unfolds—like watching a movie—but navigating it, deliberately or instinctively. This should not be confused with lucid dreaming, which centers on control or the realization that one is dreaming, enabling a subtle nudge here or there. Dream walking is closer to living within a dream state; it is a place one enters.
Across cultures, dream walking is treated with a seriousness largely absent from modern thought. Indigenous traditions frequently regard the dream world as coexisting with waking reality. One does not escape into a dream; one quite literally travels there.
The distinguishing factor is relational depth. Figures encountered are not dismissed as mere projections. Landscapes recur. Symbols exhibit consistency. The dreamer is acted upon as much as he acts. And it is here that discomfiture settles in—dream walking suggests that consciousness may operate beyond the narrow bandwidth of waking reality.
Ever wake from a dream uncertain whether you were awake or still dreaming? Is this world the dream and the other the waking world? Jung himself was cautious about declaring dream realms objectively real, yet he refused to reduce them to simple fantasy. They possess autonomy—and autonomy implies risk.
Traditions that take dream walking seriously almost always surround it with discipline and restraint. One does not wander casually, and one certainly does not boast of mastery. To move consciously within liminal spaces without grounding is to invite imbalance.
In many Native traditions, dreaming is not a passive experience. The dreamer actually goes somewhere, moving into a different layer of reality—sometimes called the spirit world, the ancestor world, or simply “the other side.” It is there that an experience takes place, often transformative. Upon returning, the dreamer may bring guidance, lost knowledge, or even new knowledge—medicines, songs, or stories. Dreamers are often guided by ancestral or animal spirits, protecting them from hostile entities or from losing the trail. One does not linger here; dream walking is not recreational, and not all beings encountered are benevolent. Dream walking without humility may lead to madness.
Perhaps the clearest institutionalized form of dream walking is the vision quest. Through fasting, isolation, exposure, and prayer, the individual deliberately thins the veil between waking and dream states. This is not a matter of hallucination; the goal is encounter. The form that encounter takes varies—it may be an experience, an ancestor, or simply an understanding of a message. Upon returning, the participant often carries answers to questions that would otherwise remain indecipherable in the waking realm.
Indigenous traditions “handle” dreams better because they approach reality in a more integrated fashion. They refuse to sever inner experience from communal life, seeing both as parts of a greater whole. Most importantly, these traditions do not impose rigid frameworks on what surrounds them. Instead, they observe and interact—accepting that things are as they are, even when understanding is incomplete.
Dream, Reality, Both, or Neither?
Eastern traditions are far less concerned with the meaning of dreams than Western traditions. In fact, they ask a far more unsettling question:
What makes waking life any more real than a dream?
These traditions approach dreams not as messages to be decoded or realms to be explored, but as demonstrations. In Buddhism, dreams illustrate the impermanence and constructed nature of experience, revealing how easily the mind fabricates reality—and clings to it. Hindu philosophy goes further, treating dreams as one of several layered states of consciousness, useful precisely because they expose how convincing illusion can be until awakening occurs. Taoism, for its part, regards dreams as indicators of alignment rather than meaning—reflections of harmony or imbalance within the flow of the Tao, not communications demanding interpretation. Across these traditions, dreams are not privileged exceptions to waking life; they are reminders that waking life itself is no more fixed, solid, or self-evident than a dream.
To the Western mind, these ideas are deeply uncomfortable. They call into question the very fabric of reality itself. The individual self may be real, and ultimate reality may be real—but this world of lived experience, though it appears solid, may itself be dreamlike, as is all common perception. This means that experience is not as stable as it seems, and that consciousness plays a central role in shaping reality. What’s more, understanding this intellectually is the easy part; living it is an entirely different matter.
A Quiet Loss
If dreams are taken seriously across cultures and centuries, the question becomes not what they mean—but what it costs to ignore them.
Dreams can be fun, especially when lucid dreaming enables us to control and direct the narrative. They can also be deeply unsettling—terrifying, even. Modern culture may not have rejected dreams outright, but as a whole, we have learned how to ignore them efficiently. We wake, check our phones, and move on. Dreams are dismissed as noise or mined briefly for novelty.
There is a cost to this. When dreams are treated as meaningless, we lose one of the few remaining spaces where contradiction, symbol, and uncertainty are allowed to exist without immediate resolution. Ignored, the contents of a dream do not simply vanish; they surface elsewhere, often amplified.
Dreams teach. Dreams assemble fragments into coherence. Dreams take us places otherwise unreachable. Pay attention—there is far more there than first meets the eye.
Final Thoughts
Dreams have never been simple, private experiences. They have warned, initiated, unsettled, redirected, and revealed—sometimes gently, often not. Seen as divine intervention, communication from the deep psyche, travel, or illusion, they expose the limits of what we know and carry us places of which one can only dream.
Historically and traditionally, every culture has placed an emphasis on dreams in some fashion. Some listen cautiously, others communally, and still others with deliberate detachment. What they share is restraint. Dreams are not seized, flaunted, or exploited, but approached with humility, discernment, and care.
Dreams exist to remind us that reality—like the dream itself—is more layered, fragile, and mysterious than we may be comfortable admitting. Call them portents, processes, journeys, or illusions, but the question remains:
Are you paying attention?
And, more importantly—if you are…
what will you do with it?
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