Talmud suggests that a dream uninterpreted is like a letter left unread.
Given how voluminous my dreams have been in this emergency time, I clearly have an enormous stack of letters waiting to be sorted through, filling my inbox as if I'm just getting home from some grand world tour. Much of it is undoubtedly junkmail. Some of it could be valuable offers of prophecy – because Talmud says that our dreams are 1/60 part prophecy, which is not a lot but which ain't nothing.
But mostly these dreams are hand-written personal letters. Meaningful correspondence from my emotional state, snailmail from my spirit; all keeping my conscious mind informed and up to date about how we are doing.
This is, at least, how I interpret the intent of my dream of Wednesday morning. It was a dream in which my father died. I can say this to you without superstition because my father actually died in 2000.
But in the dream he was hospitalized. And there were questions about whether we could be in his room or not. And some of you were there in the waiting room, available for support, and for that I was, in the dream, and am, in this waking moment, grateful. And this hospital or highrise or whatever it was we were in wasn't here; it was in Italy – Milan maybe, in the middle of the night.
And when, in the dream, my father died, my sister and I were not in fact with him, which might have been his choice or might have been circumstance. But we were called and notified. And even though it was still the pre-dawn hours and there was an epidemic going on, even in my dream, my sister and I decided we could risk a walk in the foggy dark to collect ourselves and even grab an espresso when morning came.
And that, more or less, is the dream.
So if this dream is a letter, what do I read in it as I slip it from the envelope of sleep and begin to unfold it?
I see in it, right at the top in bold ink a vivid reminder that right now grief is the thing. Grief underlies everything we're experiencing. The death of my father in the dream was my grief looking for a plot line, my grief looking for a home.
We are all grieving – in some cases the loss of loved ones. In some cases the losses we fear will come. We grieve the loss of human touch. The loss of routine and certainty. The loss of the freedom to move and just unthinkingly be. These layers of grief are why everything, even normal things, feels so persistently wrong.
What else is there to read here? The fact that we couldn't be with my father as he died is a noteworthy and not very mysterious element; a reminder that we are all feeling the hollow ache of separation. We are aware that we and our friends and our loved ones are having big moments – because these are big moments – and each of us is doing it mostly alone.
But grief and isolation are not the only topics in this missive from my unconscious. Because there was surprising beauty and love in the dream too. Inside the dream itself, my sister and I had the realization that we had 20 more years of my father than we thought we'd had. And that realization was so breathtakingly beautiful, so full of grace, that it was nearly overwhelming.
And grace is something that I am (and we are) also experiencing in this moment. We are noticing kindnesses out of nowhere. We are noticing blessings. We are in a heightened state of noticing what we usually don't: our bodies, our homes, our spirits, our energy levels, our sadnesses, our delights, our hopes, our hungers, our fears, the gentle and plodding passage of time. We are all, it seems to me, experiencing a heightened consciousness of this world and all worlds and who we are within them. We are noticing what it is like to live.
This is not a silver lining. This is not a hidden blessing of Covid-19, which does not come bearing blessings. But this is a blessing of being human. That in times of grief and danger all of our senses – our physical ones and our spiritual ones – open up and begin perceiving, and processing those perceptions; and if we don't notice them by day, they will come to us by special delivery at night.
Now what to do with all this information, this exhausting heightened awareness, is a question for which I have no ready answer. But the same page of Talmud offers a special prayer for days when we wake up from a dream that is too big to hold or comprehend. It is not a prayer for understanding, but a prayer of surrender. It is a prayer that says I cannot understand this but, that said, if something – anything – in this dream has merit, let that goodness come forth into the world, just like what happened with Joseph's dreams. And if what is in the dream is in need of healing, let it be healed like Miriam was healed from near death. And whatever we dream that we cannot understand – hafokh kol chalomotai alai l'tovah. May all of it transform into good.
This prayer is, for me, not just a prayer about our nightly dreams. It also feels right for this if-only-it-were-a-dream that we are living through. If there is any value to be found in it, let that seed take root and flourish. And whatever of this is simply curse, let it transform, like the words of Bilam looking at the tents of Israel, into blessing.
So may we open up and read the letter of this time. Read it slowly and carefully, discerning all the things it is saying to us. May we read all the words – the painful and the joyful. And where its language is simply beyond our abilities, let us surrender for now and say, hafokh kol chalomotai alai l'tovah. Please God, please merciful Universe, turn all of our dreams to good.
Talmud References: BT Berakhot 55b.