Rabbi Ephraim Sprecher, Dean of Students and Senior Lecturer at Diaspora Yeshiva, is not only a popular speaker and teacher, but also a dynamic thinker and writer. A student of Harav Yaakov Kamenetsky and Harav Gedalia Schorr, Rabbi Sprecher was granted smicha (rabbinical ordination) by Torah Vodaath Yeshiva. Prior to his current position, Rabbi Sprecher was a professor of Judaic studies at Touro College in New York. In addition to his duties at Diaspora Yeshiva, Rabbi Sprecher writes a regular column on various Judaic topics in the Jewish Press, and lectures regularly at the OU Israel Center in Jerusalem.
Why Do We Dream?
Published: Tuesday, November 1, 2016 09:42:28 AM
Number of views: 1641

There was a popular song called “Life is but a Dream”. The Mishnah in Avot states, “One moment of pleasure in the After-Life is better than all of life in this world”.

How can we have confidence that another world awaits us after death? The answer is dreams! Have you ever had a dream that was so vivid, that you experienced it as if it were reality, but then you woke up and realized that it was all an allusion?

Dreams remind us that this world is not the ultimate reality. After death, we will awake to an even more real existence, and our experience in this world will be like a dream to us. That is why the Talmud describes sleep as one sixtieth of death, so that we can taste the After-Life in this world. The Zohar teaches that everything in this world serves to teach us about the ultimate reality of the Spiritual World. This world is really just an illusion and the Next World is the ultimate reality.

This world may seem real, but one day, we will leave this physical dimension and enter an entirely different spiritual dimension, which I call the Fifth Dimension!

A dream is a humbling experience, and it is the key to belief in the After-Life. So even a dream, the experience of illusion teaches us about the ultimate reality of the World To Come. This is what the Mishnah in Avot means, “This world is compared to a foyer or lobby before the World To Come. Prepare yourself in the foyer, so that you may enter the banquet hall of the After-Life”.

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