I Dreamed a Dream by Rivki D. Rosenwald Esq., CLC, SDS

I Dreamed a Dream

By Rivki D. Rosenwald Esq., LMFT, CLC, SDS

Help! Your teeth are crumbling and falling out.

Did you ever have that dream?

How about that you can fly way above the world to escape some bad guy?

Tell me why you never had a dream that you were going to be the father of a whole new nation and G-d would be with you to the very end.

I’ll tell you – when was the last time you were willing to lay yourself down, on a filthy floor, outside on the ground, no less? And furthermore, use a bunch of rocks as your pillow? Honestly, talk about waking up with a pounding headache. Literally!

Oh, and wait, theses rocks happen to be bickering in your ears all night, wanting the honor of being directly under your head.

And then, G-d sends you an image of a ladder with angels going up and down, as He did to Jacob.

The only ladders we seem to encounter are the ones we use to get out the Pesach dishes or to change a lightbulb that everyone else ignored for weeks, if you’re handy. Where’s an angel to take care of all that for any of us?

In this week’s parsha, we encounter the first recorded dream. Do you think before that people were just sprawled out, lying there all night, thinking absolutely nothing before Yaakov’s dream? We’ve got to figure the reason that G-d is suddenly sharing this message with us now.

Perhaps it’s to teach us that every dream is not a nightmare. Most of the time, we wake up sweating from a dream, glad to be assured we are alive and all is OK. But how often do we wake up thinking, “Wow! That dream was dreamy”? Maybe we need to do that more…. That would be super. Or maybe we need to celebrate just waking up!

Maybe the idea that we did wake up tells us that Hashem is on top of our ladder whether we saw Him there or not at night. He is with us always – through all our dreams and through all our days and nights.

There’s that wonderful prayer we recite each morning: “Thankful am I before You the living and lasting King of the universe.”

I didn’t have to sleep on stone, or relax on rocks, or travel far from home, and still I’m back to forge another day.

I got to go under my comfy blanket. Sleep on my down-filled pillow. And wake up at home. Hopefully, with Hashem’s blessing, refreshed and ready to embrace a new day.

See if you can take a step toward scaling that ladder. And thus have more dreamy days!

How often do we wake up thinking, “Wow! That dream was dreamy”?