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  • According to many people Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis and especially

  • 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.

According to many people Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis and especially

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