What does Judaism have to say about dreams and do have any legitimacy?
Are they in any way binding, or are they assumed to be just products of an overactive imagination?
Answer
Dreams are essentially a lower-prophecy that anyone can receive. In the Torah, many people experience dreams with messages, Yaakov, Yosef, Pharoh and his wine-maker and baker, Avimelech, Ballaam.
Talmud Bruchos 55a-57b has a bunch to say about dreams and how to interpret certain symbols in dreams.
- Dreams are 1/60th of a prophecy.
- Part of them is nonsense. "Just as wheat cannot be without straw, so there cannot be a dream without some nonsense" (55a)
- "A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read." (55a)
- A good dream can take as long as 22 years to be fulfilled. (55b)
- (and much more)
on Interpreting Dreams: A dream is not inherently good or bad. "All dreams follow the mouth"(55b), if the interpreter interprets the dream as good, it will be good, if they interpret it as bad it's bad. As such, one should always try to interpret a dream as good. Bar Hedya would give positive interpretations only to those who paid him, and unfavorable interpretations to those who didn't. (56a)
Birkat Kohanim has a paragraph to pray for a positive-conversion of a dream you dreamt and you don't remember. (55b)
Rambam: in the Guide of the Perplexed
Part of the functions of the imaginative faculty is, as you well know, to retain impressions by the senses, to combine them, and chiefly to form images. The principal and highest function is performed when the senses are at rest and pause in their action, for then it receives, to some extent, divine inspiration in the measure as it is predisposed for this influence. This is the nature of those dreams which prove true, and also of prophecy, the difference being one of quantity, not of quality. Thus our Sages say, that dream is the sixtieth part of prophecy: and no such comparison could be made between two things of different kinds, for we cannot say the perfection of man is so many times the perfection of a horse. In Bereshit Rabba (sect. xvii.) the following saying of our Sages occurs," Dream is the nobelet (the unripe fruit) of prophecy." This is an excellent comparison, for the unripe fruit (nohelet) is really the fruit to some extent, only it has fallen from the tree before it was fully developed and ripe. In a similar manner the action of the imaginative faculty during sleep is the same as at the time when it receives a prophecy, only in the first case it is not fully developed, and has not yet reached its highest degree. But why need I quote the words of our Sages, when I can refer to the following passage of Scripture :" If there be among you a prophet, I, the Lord, will make myself known unto him in a vision, in a dream will I speak to him" (Num. xii. 6). Here the Lord tells us what the real essence of prophecy is, that it is a perfection acquired in a dream or in a vision (the original mareh is a noun derived from the verb raah): the imaginative faculty acquires such an efficiency in its action that it sees the thing as if it came from without, and perceives it as if through the medium of bodily senses. These two modes of prophecy, vision and dream, include all its different degrees. It is a well-known fact that the thing which engages greatly and earnestly man's attention whilst he is awake and in the full possession of his senses forms during his sleep the object of the action of his imaginative faculty. Imagination is then only influenced by the intellect in so far as it is predisposed for such influence. It would be quite useless to illustrate this by a simile, or to explain it fully, as it is clear, and every one knows it. It is like the action of the senses, the existence of which no person with common sense would ever deny.
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