Guest Columnists
The 2000 Year Dream

I have healed the sick, flown through thin air, and conversed with dead people—without leaving the comfort of my bedroom! No, this is not an advertisement for a therapeutic pillow-top time machine that flies, but merely a brief synopsis of the dreams I had last week.

All of us dream. Some of the more common dreams include forgetting children in public, appearing naked in public, speaking at large public events, hair falling out, or a combination of the above. To date, I never dreamt that sheaves of wheat bowed to me or that celestial beings prostrated themselves to me. I have also never dreamt about bulimic bovines or anorexic agriculture. Then again, I am not the biblical Joseph or Pharaoh, the king of Egypt.

When we sleep, our prefrontal cortex lay dormant. This part of the brain facilitates logical and reasoned thinking. Its inactive state causes raw, random and strange thoughts to flow unfiltered into our dreams.

In our dreams, opposites don't attract, they dovetail togetherIn our dreams, opposites don't attract, they dovetail together. The Talmud writes that the dreamscape is where, "the elephant fits through the eye of the needle." In a dream, the absurd is the acceptable.

Joseph's dreams about his family and himself were a major catalyst to the exile in Egypt. Pharaoh's dreams also played a role in bringing the Jewish people into Egypt. According to Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad chassidism, the dreamscape is analogous to exile. This explains why those dreams were a major channel that brought the Jews into Egypt.

Exile, like the dreamscape, is all about the convergence of conflicting ideas. In exile, we feel pulled in divergent directions.

The day started out fabulous, filled with heartfelt prayers and meaningful meditations. But by 10:00 a.m. and that second latte, prayer seemed about as plausible as a ten-day golf excursion in Palm Springs, and so it goes. We become that Talmudic elephant, trying to thrust our head through the eye of the needle of life.

Do not infer that life in exile lacks real substance. This world is real. What then can we learn from all this talk of the dream masquerading as real life?

The world just like the dreamscape is not normal, nor should we approach it that way. Life rarely moves forward in a straight line. In the same vein, we should not feel obliged to follow a logical and direct progression in our spiritual development.

This world also has the same absurd potential as a dream. The juxtaposition of opposites opens the door to fundamental change. We are not locked into a caste system of social hierarchy. We can be movers and shakers, on Main Street, in a pink bathrobe, changing the lives of others and our own. We are not confined to our psychological quirks but can shed them as quickly as I manhandled a gorilla last week. It is all possible. If you can dream it, than you can do it.