Dreams are the interior sleeping experiences of individual people, sometimes remembered by a person when he awakens, often not, sometimes narrative, other times disjointed and symbolic in flashes or episodes. Whether stories or scenes, we sometimes want more from our dreams than just entertainment.

Before Freud, many literate interpreters of dreams assumed that these internal episodes were portents of the future revealed to individuals by some external angel or God. A person’s dreams were personal portals through which he or she could glimpse outside and see his fortune-to-come.

That is how the Bible, the Talmud, and later rabbinic texts present the subjects of dreams and the acts of dream interpretation.

After Freud’s radical paradigm shift, the norm was to see dreams as windows into the personal fears and wishes that stemmed from an individual’s life experiences. Freud observably disavowed the notion that an independent ontological realm was sending messages to people via their dreams. He saw them as another means by which to delve into people’s inner psyches, as messages from the interior and from the near or distant past.

Nothing can be said about reports of dreams in the Hebrew Bible or the Talmud or for that matter in any human subculture without first recognizing the revolutionary works on the topic by the psychologists of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially Sigmund Freud. It is well known that Freud was a Jew and probably knew some of the Jewish traditions about dreams. Surely he knew of the biblical narratives about Joseph’s dreams and other ancient texts and references to dreaming.

The chapters of this audiobook cover diverse aspects of Jewish dreams through the varied prisms of several scholars and classical Jewish texts.