Early in the morning on May 24, 2001, 20-year-old Sara* awoke shaking from a dream. This was her wedding day, and the warning conveyed in the dream couldn’t have been clearer: She must change wedding halls to avoid disaster. But how could she do such a thing, throwing family and guests into turmoil and causing a major expense — just because of a bad dream? Sara couldn’t calm down, though, and after discussing her dream with a respected rebbetzin who asked her salient questions about the nature of the dream and concluded that it should be taken seriously, the young bride actually heeded the dream and found another hall.

And doing so saved countless lives, possibly even her own. The original hall in which the wedding was scheduled to take place was located on the first floor of the Versailles wedding hall complex in the Talpiot section of Jerusalem. Due to a flawed structural design, the third floor of Versailles collapsed that evening, hurling hundreds of wedding guests crashing through two empty floors below. In what was Israel’s worst civilian disaster, 23 people were killed and 380 were injured. Had Sara not changed the venue at the last minute, the toll would have been much higher.

Readers might remember the shocking, yet heartwarming dream story of Erez Deri, Hashem yikom damo, a young IDF paratrooper killed in an operation in Jenin in 2006. In 2011, educator Rabbi Yotav Eliach was leading a group of 50 American teenagers on an Israel tour, and their last stop before flying back was the Har Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. A few feet from where the group was standing, the students noticed an elderly couple crying over the kever of their son Erez. The woman then told Rabbi Eliach a story that left him, and the group, speechless. The night before, Erez appeared to his mother in a dream. He told her that although they would never merit to take him to the chuppah, they should write a sefer Torah in his name — that would be his chuppah. In the dream, Erez continued his instructions: “Go to Har Herzl, and there you will meet good people who will help you make it happen.” The students, flabbergasted, answered in unison, “Next year we’re coming back with a sefer Torah!” And so it was — the group embarked on a fundraising campaign, and the following year they came back — with Erez’s sefer Torah.

Message from Above

All of us have dreams — in fact, most people average four to six dreams every night. We usually dream about the people and events that occupy our conscious mind during the day. Some of those dreams might offer insights into our subconscious selves; others are mostly nonsense. Through dreams, we are catapulted into fantasy worlds unshackled by the laws of physics or the dimensions of time and space. In dreams we can fly, walk through walls, and easily shift between scenes and events. But few of these dreams leave a lasting impression, and despite their clarity upon waking, they are soon forgotten. Yet sometimes those dreams catch us completely by surprise, seeming to give us a message about something we know nothing about.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 693)