The beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Miketz, describes two of Pharaoh’s dreams. First he dreamed about seven healthy cows who got devoured by seven gaunt cows. Then he dreamed about seven healthy ears of grain that got devoured by seven thin gaunt ears. Disconcerting images.
Both times, he woke and realized he’d been dreaming. And then one of his servants remembered the fellow named Joseph, languishing in prison, who was able to interpret dreams. And so Joseph was released from prison, and brought to Pharaoh to help him understand the meaning of his dreaming.
The teacher of my teachers, Reb Zalman z”l, wrote:
When my daughter, Shel, was 8 years old, she asked me, “Abba, when you’re asleep, you can wake up, right? When you are awake, can you wake up even more?”
(– Expanded Awareness and Extended Consciousness)
The answer, of course, is yes. Yes, we can wake up more. We can wake from complacency. We can wake from routine. We can wake from taking things for granted. We can wake to hope and to wonder. That’s the good news. The frustrating news is that such awakenings are rarely permanent. We wake from complacency and recognize that if we want a morerighteous world, we have to build it… and then we forget. We wake from routine and recognize that being alive is a miracle… and then we forget.
This is spiritual life: being awakened into awareness, and then falling out of awareness, and then awakening again. None of us can live in a perennial state of gadlut, expansive consciousness. The great thing about the fact that we keep falling asleep is that we can also keep waking up. We’re designed to keep waking up. I posit to you that being “asleep” isn’t actually a bad thing. Spiritually, maybe we need the oscillation between forgetting and remembering. And maybe being “asleep” helps us daydream.
Pharaoh was troubled by his dreams. We’ve all had that experience: a recurring dream that sticks with us long after the day’s first cup of coffee. We wonder: what is the dream trying to tell us? What does it mean? My friend and teacher Rodger Kamenetz, author of The History of Last Night’s Dream, teaches that dreams aren’t “texts” to be “interpreted.” Rather, they’re landscapes of feeling. They can give us deep access to our emotions. (If this interests you, learn more about his practice of dreamwork.)
I wonder what would happen if we approached our waking dreams the way Rodger suggests approaching our sleeping dreams: entering the emotional landscape of the reverie, with a trusted guide and companion, and seeing what we can learn from that exploration of our yearnings. Waking reveries are different from nighttime dreams, but I think we should treat our daydreams with the same presumption of depth and meaning that we bring to thinking about the dreams that play out while we sleep.
I think our daydreams can tell us a lot about what we yearn for: not what we think we’re “supposed” to want, but what our hearts and souls actually crave. Maybe we ache for love, or for comfort, or for justice, or for being fully uplifted in all that we are. But most of us are taught, in a variety of ways, not to credit those yearnings. What would happen if we chose to wake up: not from those dreams, but with those dreams? What would happen if we brought our daydreams more fully into our waking lives?
We always reach parashat Miketz at this time of year. I imagine there’s something different, psycho-spiritually, about reading Miketz in Australia or Argentina where right now it’s high summer. Where I live, this is a season of deepening winter. Long nights, short days, battening down the hatches… Winter’s a great time to hunker down and pay attention to our dreams — the sleeping ones, and the waking ones — to see what they tell us about what we fear, and what we love, and what we yearn for.
What do you dream of: for yourself? For your family, whether blood or chosen? For your community? For your world?
If we allow ourselves to face our yearnings, we also have to face fear that our yearnings might not come to pass. The dreams of our hearts are tender. (If you’re going to delve into them, I hope you do so with a trusted guide, maybe a therapist or spiritual director.) When Joseph helped Pharaoh understand his dreams, Pharaoh made decisions about the future of his nation (and ours, too). What changes might we make if we took our own dreams seriously — the sleeping ones, and the waking ones too?
May this winter give you us space and safety we need to look at what we yearn for… and may we find the inner reserves of fuel we need in order to make those dreams come true.
With gratitude to my hevruta partner for opening up for me these connections between Miketz and dream.
Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.
Shavua tov — a good new week to you.
Some of you may remember receiving this note in years past. It seems to really speak to people, so I’m sending it again; the sentiments remain true!
