Oneiric Imagination and Mystical Annihilation in Habad Hasidism

Abstract

Scholarly depictions of mysticism, as varied as they have been, frequently include visions and dreams on the list of common characteristics. Literary and other material artifacts attest that communion with what is considered in a particular milieu to be the fount of inspiration can provoke revelatory experiences, and the history of Judaism is no exception to this rule. Dreams, in particular, have been portrayed as a significant channel of information from the transcendent power beyond the sensory realm. It goes without saying that the phenomenon of the dream is a matter far too variegated to be pursued here responsibly. One dimension of the dream, however, that I will highlight, is its allusive and elusive character. The dream, as others have noted, is a state of consciousness hovering between wakefulness and dormancy, darkness and light. From that angle of vision, we can think of dreams as a vehicle of dissimulation, comporting, as they do, an intent that is both hidden in and exposed through the shadow of image or sound.1 Analogously, esotericism, which I have privileged as a delineating characteristic of mysticism, proffers the notion of mystery whose depth must be disclosed by proper interpretative decoding, though it, like the dream, is caught between concealment and disclosure, concealed in its disclosure, disclosed in its concealment. The dream, moreover, bespeaks the excess of human imagination in a distinctive way, bearing a mythologic—a term that concurrently connotes the logos of mythos and the mythos of logos and therefore should not be construed as privileging either logical or mythical patterns of discourse, rendering one subordinate to the other—that extends beyond itself in the