Sefer Bereshis contains many dreamers and their dreams. First we have Yakov’s dream followed by Yosef’s dreams, Pharaoh’s dreams, and the Butler and the Baker’s dreams.

There was a popular song called “Life is but a Dream.” Why do we dream? What is the meaning of our dreams? 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 illusion?

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 in Berachot describes sleep as one sixtieth of death, so that we can taste the After‑Life in this world. And that is why there are two events in life that one cannot predict when they will occur – Sleep and Death!

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. That is why the Talmud calls this world Olam Hashekr (World of lies – fake news) and the After Life is called Olam Ha‑Emet (World of Truth).

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.”

As the Chinese Philosopher Chuang Tzu wrote twenty six hundred years ago “In the midst of a dream, we cannot know it’s a dream. Only after we are awake, do we know it was a dream. But only after the GREAT Awakening can we understand that all of this life is just a great dream.”