qabalah and dreaming

isthmus nekoi

I was wondering if any of the "canonical" Qabalistic texts discuss dreams and the role they play in developing or maintaining consciousness.

I would imagine that unless there is some underlying psychosis that should not be provoked, working with dream material is probably a very powerful, natural and psychologically safe way to augment one's approach to a experiential and personal understanding of the tree of life.
 

jewishbohemian

dreams

The Talmud is filled with stories and information about dreams; there is a whole section in Gemora Brachot which interprets different dreams and the meaning of sexual union in dreams. It is said that a person can not live without dreaming once in seven days. Dreams are a compilation of working things that happened during the day and deep secrets and signs often embedded within. Dreams come from a place beyond logic: Keter/Crown in Cabalistic terminology; they are pure because our consciousness is asleep.
 

isthmus nekoi

jewishbohemian said:
It is said that a person can not live without dreaming once in seven days. Dreams are a compilation of working things that happened during the day and deep secrets and signs often embedded within. Dreams come from a place beyond logic: Keter/Crown in Cabalistic terminology; they are pure because our consciousness is asleep.

It is true that when a person is deprieved from REM sleep (the stage in which dreaming is supposed to occur - although personal and anecdotal experience leads me to believe that dreaming and states of consciousness in sleep aren't so regularly organized as scientists would have us believe), they will begin to hallucinate when awake and perhaps yes, even die. I would need to double check the death part though.

As for dreams and their relation to the tree, it would make sense that their source may be represented as Kether, but as for dreams themselves, there seems to me to be differing levels of dreaming as there are differing levels of consciousness, like an inverted tree. Or it's all the same in the end anyways.

On a side note about consciousness and dreaming - not all animals (amphibians, fish) go through stages of REM sleep but some do (birds, mammals, perhaps reptiles), suggesting some sort of evolutionary thing happening. It's too bad we can't ever be sure of the phenomenology of animals...
 

jewishbohemian

The Talmud says a person can not live seven days without dreaming and that dreams in the morning are often prophetic; also what we think about at night is mirrored in our dreams at night. There is much in the Torah about wet dreams, you would be surprised. Personally, I think dreaming exists in a place between heaven and earth where things get worked out. The lower the consciousness, the less is the dream as it concerns animals similar to pain—the less the consciousness the less they feel pain. In Cabala, the animal differs from the human in their imperfect ability to know. The only evolution is to get closer to God—animals will always be animals.
 

Fulgour

isthmus nekoi said:
On a side note about consciousness and dreaming - not all animals (amphibians, fish) go through stages of REM sleep but some do (birds, mammals, perhaps reptiles), suggesting some sort of evolutionary thing happening. It's too bad we can't ever be sure of the phenomenology of animals...
Deoxyribonucleic acid dreams in polymer colours.
 

Fulgour

jewishbohemian said:
The only evolution is to get closer to God—animals will always be animals.
God is an Animal, too. How could She not be?
 

moderndayruth

Kabbalah&Dreaming

You might be interested in a Catherine Shainberg's book - Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming, it's a good one
 

isthmus nekoi

jewishbohemian> I'm inclined to agree that dreams are a sort of intermediary state, not just theoretically, but in a physiological sense - our bodies seem almost awake while dreaming, hence the rapid eye movement.

However, in terms of lower consciousness meaning less dreaming, I'm also inclined to believe this except for the fact that the stage we experience most sleep/rem is during infancy. It's a slow, general decline from there despite the fact that we're more conscious as adults than as babies. This might suggest that dreaming is related to the acquisition of consciousness and awareness, a process that needs to be supplemented by meditation as we age if we want to mirror the same incredible pace of acquiring more consciousness.

Fulgour> lol, and computers dream of electric sheep.

moderndayruth> From the reviews on Amazon, this text seems to be mainly a "how to" book to work with dreams rather than study of Kabbalah. Would this assessment be correct?
 

Fulgour

isthmus nekoi said:
Fulgour> lol, and computers dream of electric sheep.
I won't go so far as to say, if it doesn't dream it's not alive,
but then I can't, because my experience is that it is just so
and I have no other reference... therefore DNA must dream.
 

jewishbohemian

I think that dreaming is an emotional state where the animal of the person goes to rest-we see animal sleeping habits are much like our own. It was a wide spread ability during the time of the Talmud 2000 years ago for people to control the limbs of their bodies while asleep and therefore did not require to wash their hands in the morning to remove the residue of death left after sleep, as it says in the Talmud: sleep is a 60th of death. The child's consciousness is one of an animal--anyone rising children knows that; our ascention from animal to human occurres in different stages throughout life. To be human is to control our freedom of choice from the essence of the soul--will; to be a conscious animal is often as far as people get in their lives. Meditation helps to free one from the animal thoughts and desires and enter into the realm of the human soul. By being conscious of the dream state of the animal prepares the person to recieve messages, in the form of prophetic dreams sent from the human soul. The soul is like a star in the sky animating a particular form of life through the constant drip of the soul's attenuated light.