Maimonides on Visions and Dreams

This presentation, based upon a lengthy lecture on the subject, provides a brief look at Maimonides’ views of visions, dreams, and their interpretation. One of my purposes is to draw attention to Maimonides’ view that dreams can be a higher, imaginative, poetic, and prophetic apprehension of truth than philosophy, or what we would call a scientific approach alone can provide. This greatest Jewish medieval philosopher and physician, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (pp. 1135-1204), often quoted God’s words, “If there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, do make myself known to him in a vision, I do speak with him in a dream…” (Numbers 12: 6-7). Maimonides’ fourth major work, The Guide of the Perplexed (written in Arabic about 1190), is the primary source for the subject.

Maimonides is adamant that many of the events recounted in Scripture are accounts of the visions and dreams of prophets other than Moses and are not real in the objective sense. He states that the prophetic texts may or may not be identified as visions or dreams, but that readers should be prepared to assume that such is always the case. He writes, “…in the case of prophetic parables seen or enacted in a vision of prophecy, when the parable requires certain action, when things are [said to be] done by the prophet, when intervals of time are mentioned … [know that] this takes place only in a vision of prophecy [and that] they are not real actions, actions that exist for the external senses” (The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963: part II:chapter 46, page 404, hereafter, GP).

Maimonides deals at length with the psychology of visions and dreams. In explaining the difference between visions and dreams, Maimonides says of dreams, “I do not need to explain what a dream is” (GP II: pp. 41, 385). A vision, on the other hand, “is a fearful terrifying state which comes to a prophet when he is awake…. In such a state as this the senses … cease to function…. Thereupon the terror and the strong affection … become intensified and then prophetic revelation comes… (GP II: pp. 41, 385).

A dream is distinguished from a vision in that speech is heard in it, in accordance with “I do speak to him in dream.” As for visions in which it is reported that speech is heard, Maimonides says, “every vision in which you find the prophet hearing speech was [only] in its beginning a vision, but ended in a state of submersion and became a dream” (GP II: pp. 45, 402). Maimonides draws attention repeatedly to “I do speak to him in a dream,” as making language, the characteristics and the peculiarities of language, essential in the interpretation of dreams.

There are two basic notions on which Maimonides’ psychological view of visions and dreams is based. The first is that the fundamental functions of all living forms, including human beings, may be characterized in terms of designative faculties, specifically nutritive, sensitive, imaginative, appetitive, and rational. The second is that visions and dreams are the products of the action of these designative faculties. The latter is a clear harbinger of what Freud referred to as the “dream work.”

As Maimonides indicates, the narratives

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and the poetry of the Scripture reach to a higher truth by virtue of the role of the human imaginative faculty. This notion is a harbinger of the great Romantic tradition that flowered in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But the imaginative faculty can also combine images in different ways, producing combinations representative of things that have never been directly experienced, and can thus be misleading or revelatory.

Like Freud, Maimonides recognizes that the imaginative faculty can, combined with the rational faculty, lead to greater understanding than the rational faculty is capable of by itself. This is important to note since philosophers [scientists] are lacking in the imaginative faculty. As he states, “…the case in which the intellectual overflow overflows only toward the rational faculty and does not overflow at all towards the imaginative faculty … is characteristic of the men of speculation [philosophy, science]” (GP II: pp. 37, 374).

Among the pointers Maimonides offers are that there are two kinds of dreams. There are dreams in which the internal meaning is contained in the theme of the dream. These are parables. More difficult are the dreams that are composites, where separate meanings are woven together into a whole in the dream, calling for separation and separate decoding.

With respect to the latter, the first step in the identification of the internal meaning of the dream is to recognize the fact that it is a composite, to break it up, and to deal with the parts separately. The latter corresponds to the classical ad locum form of exegesis of Scriptural texts. Maimonides exemplifies this method as appropriate for the interpretation of the dream of the ladder that Jacob is reported to have had. The text states, “And behold a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold the Lord stood above it” (Genesis 28:12-13). Maimonides’ advice is to break out the parts of the dream on the assumption that it is a composite. He states the word “ladder” indicates one subject, “set up on the earth” a second, “and the top of it reached to heaven” a third, “and behold the angels of God” a fourth, “ascending” a fifth, “and descending” a sixth, and “And behold the Lord stood above it” a seventh (GP, Introduction to the First Part, pp. 12-13).

In view of the assumption that the dream is a composite, a major deviation takes place from the common principle of identifying meaning, which is to carefully identify the questionable item in its context and then to use the context as a guide. Here one has to overcome the context to get to the meaning. For the process of dream making is to impose an artificial context, as it were, which obscures the internal meanings.

To help the reader, Maimonides presents a lengthy lexicon of terms from Scripture. Virtually the whole of the first part of the three parts of The Guide of the Perplexed is devoted to this task. For each term he presents a number of alternative meanings that the term may designate. These alternative meanings derive from other places in Scripture. Since the principle is to defy the context in order to grasp the meaning, the lexicon is an aid.

In addition to the lexicographic method, Maimonides introduces several other methods of determining meaning. One of these is to assume that the text should be converted into a rebus, and interpret from there. Using English, it would be as though a dream contained an image of a window. Window is “win” and “dow,” or, phonetically, “win dough,” or “win money.”

Maimonides explains this method of interpretation by saying that the prophets see things in their dreams and visions “whose purpose it is to point to what is called to the attention by the term designating the thing seen because of that term’s derivation or because of an equivocality of terms” (GP II: pp. 43, 392). He gives an example from Jeremiah. Jeremiah sees a rod of an almond tree. The Hebrew word for almond is shaqed. However, the word shoqed in Hebrew means “to watch over.” Therefore, the meaning of Jeremiah’s seeing the rod of the almond tree is that God watches over (Jeremiah 1:11-12; GP II: pp. 43, 392).

He also finds a license for finding the meaning of Scripture by taking the anagram of a word as expressing the internal meaning. Thus, habol, meaning spoil [the vineyards] in Hebrew, is transformed into bahol, meaning loath [God], by “changing,” he says, “the order of the “ha,” the “ba,” and the “lam.” And, he adds, “solely the order of the letters is changed; and between the two terms there is no way an etymological connection or a community of meaning” (GP II: pp. 43, 393).

In conclusion, I want to suggest that Maimonides’ contribution to the understanding of visions and dreams has been little appreciated and that his work is a major harbinger of the work of Freud in the 20th century.

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