Berakhot 57b:13: There are five matters in our world which are one-sixtieth of their most extreme manifestations. They are: Fire, honey, Shabbat, sleep, and a dream. The Gemara elaborates: Our fire is one-sixtieth of the fire of Gehenna; honey is one-sixtieth of manna; Shabbat is one-sixtieth of the World-to-Come; sleep is one-sixtieth of death; and a dream is one-sixtieth of prophecy.
It is said that Kislev is the month of dreams — 9 dreams appear in the Torah portions of the month. In the Torah and Talmud, dreams carry special significance — Judaism tells us that our dreams are not to be ignored. They can hold valuable, even prophetic information… if we listen closely enough. This Kislev, our New Voices fellows discussed their relationships to dreaming, resulting in three mini-reflections.
Another Life
by Victoria Dozer
Once a month, or maybe once every two months, the major players in my life will appear behind my eyelids and my entire week will change.
My dreams don’t roll over me like waves, but more like truck tires. I wake up feeling wobbly in my philosophies, as if I’d revealed myself to be a hypocrite or learned a compelling secret. I’m not an absurdist — never do I run off to join the circus, abandon my beliefs, or rearrange my face. Instead, this is my time to explore the “what ifs” that I’d never normally entertain. What if I’d pursued another degree, deserted a friendship, or pursued a great love? Dancing around my skull, my dreams pull these threads out from under my brain and smack onto the page.
I can’t ignore them, they come to me in visions and oh so infrequently. So, my dreams guide my next moves. As prophets, they predict where my mind will wander in class.
Floundering midnight mornings, the earth,
by Tyler Kliem
Floundering midnight mornings, the earth,
as my eyes verge into waves. Opening, the
breath of lacerated thinkmatter, my portraits
inked with powder. My brain has met the night,
raining with its war. I grieve
the sandwiches Jonah ate, depriving me of shelter. I grieve
the silhouette foxes that killed, or I grieve
the cranking ill form of my mother, hunched over the family
computer, deceiving me into existence.
The Dreaming Me
by Ashton Macklin
It’s like a conversation with myself, but it feels like simultaneously a person that is not me, but also not anyone else. Sometimes it happens where I’m not truly asleep yet, but know I really want to, and it’ll be an experience I’ll tell myself I want or “dream of” but then whisper to the dream to stop. Then the “dreaming me” will be mad, and make it a dream it knows I don’t want. Then when I don’t want, it won’t want to show me anything, which, to be honest, is sometimes the best. I find my relationship to dreaming is defined by my relationship to reality. When it feels so real that I can’t tell it’s not separate from reality, it stops being like a game where you can choose when to stop. It makes lacking reality the frightening part.
