.........חלום – chalom
“Dreams” The word also means “heal” (Radak,Sefer Hashorashim) and may allude to the idea that sometimes dreams help the healing process after a trauma or tragedy. The word also bears a strong phonetic similarity to the word window — חלון —chalon, because a dream is also a window into the subconscious and the soul. A chassidic thinker once pointed out that if we rearrange the letters of חלום we can find either לוחם — lochem — fight, or מוחל —mochel — forgo. He said that when one has a dream, one has the choice to fight for it and make it come true or to forgo it and let it lapse.
Judaism, Dreams & Dream Interpretation
Good dreams, bad dreams--do they mean anything?
The Bible expresses the belief that dreams can contain revelations from on high, as in the dreams of Jacob, Joseph, and Pharaoh in the book of Genesis. The prophetic vision, the Bible states (Numbers 12:6), comes in a dream. A rabbinic saying has it that a dream is a sixtieth of prophecy. Maimonides (Guide of the Perplexed, 3.36-8) develops his theory that in the dream the imaginative faculty is awakened, without which prophecy is impossible.
Did I have a Near Death Experience?
By Julius
During the fall, October or November of 1955;
I nearly died from Anesthetic Shock; anesthesia in those days was very risky. I was scared, very scared and crying as they brought me into the operating room, they put the mask over my face and told me to count backwards from ten, I just cried. The next thing I knew I was still crying and floating near the ceiling looking down onto myself and the doctors, one of the doctors pulled off his mask and said he’s gone, I shouted out “No I’m here, can’t you see me. I’m here.” And then the next thing I knew I was floating in space and still crying,
I saw galaxies and stars, and I heard voices that sounded like a choir. The voices were saying “Dewey, we’re coming for you.” Over and over, (My nick name is Dewey) I was scared so very scared. Then I saw a light far in the distance, and there was a man in the light, the strange thing is I couldn’t see the bottom half of the man, it was like seeing a news caster on TV. The voices were getting louder and louder and the light got closer, but I still couldn’t see the bottom half of the man. Just as I started to step into the light, I woke up in the recovery room vomiting and a nurse came running to my side with a suction tube and started to suction the vomit out of my mouth to prevent me from drowning in the vomit. I never spoke of this until I was 14 years old, my mother told me that I nearly died during surgery, and then I told my mother this story.
There is a good deal of material on dreams in the Talmud but a degree of ambiguity about the efficacy of dreams. In one talmudic passage it is implied that dreams are a manifestation of the unconscious, as Freud suggests, or, at least, this is the meaning that can be given to the talmudic statement: “A man is only shown in a dream that of which he thinks during the day.”
Legal Status of Dreams
In matters of law, information obtained in a dream is disregarded. The illustration is given of a man whose father appeared to him in a dream and informed him that a sum of money, hidden in such-and-such a place had been designated by him for charity and it belonged to the poor. The ruling given was that the dream could be disregarded and the son could keep the money for himself.
While a rabbinic scholar might occasionally claim that a suggested interpretation of a biblical or talmudic text came to him in a dream, the habit of Jacob of Marvege (13th century) of using information conveyed to him in dreams as authoritative in law was extremely unusual.
After fasting and employing other techniques, Jacob would present halakhic (Jewish legal) queries to heaven, to which he received replies in dreams. These replies are recorded in Jacob’s work entitled Responsa from Heaven. We should not be surprised that, according to the work, ‘Heaven’ always had the same halakhic opinions as the French talmudists.
Interpretation & Fasting
The talmudic statement that a dream depends on how it is interpreted, puzzling to the more philosophically minded, is discussed in the Responsa of Solomon Ibn Adret. Based on a talmudic passage, a special ceremony developed of interpreting for good a bad dream. The procedure was for the man who had the dream to say to three other persons: “I have had a dream and do not know what to make of it”; and they would reply: “The dream is a good one and is for your good.”
Many people, disturbed by a bad dream, would fast in order to ward off the possible evil effects. The rabbis allowed such a fast to be undertaken even on the Sabbath in order to release the man from his anxiety but they required him to undertake another fast for having fasted on the Sabbath.