The dream came while I was performing with my drag a cappella quartet, the Kinsey Sicks, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It was hot and I went to sleep with balcony doors open, overlooking the dazzling blue Bay of Banderas. It was just a month after my mother’s death; in fact, it was my first day out of shloshim, the traditional 30-day mourning period.

In my dream, I walked into a fin de siècle European sanitorium. A balding, bespectacled doctor was there with my mother. He had figured out what was wrong with her brain and it was an easy fix. He’d just gone ahead and done it and she was instantly okay—younger and stronger than I’d ever seen her, luminous really, and he said there was no longer a reason for her to be there. So I took her in the car and we sped through towns and forests until we were driving up a mountain rising out of the Aegean Sea—climbing, climbing as if up to Olympus itself, Mediterranean blue as far as the eye could see.

We drove, sitting side by side in the car, just as we had been at the moment of her stroke. At this point my waking memory began to seep in. I realized something was not right. I pulled over and told her that we’d already sat shivah for her, and it had been so sad. I fell on her shoulder, and she held me while I cried.

That’s pretty much the entirety of the dream. It was beautiful and sad, and not particularly mysterious. I was venting my grief, letting go of the weeks—and years—of worry about her health and safety. My subconscious giving me a chance to feel some peace. But the thing is, it didn’t just feel like my subconscious or like my imagination. It felt message-y, like I know grieving people sometimes experience. It felt like a hello. A message from Mom that she was okay, her suffering healed. And its feeling that way was, for me, a problem, because I am, in part, a skeptic. Despite my seeking and my storytelling of connections between worlds and my unending references to angels, I inevitably hold some amount of it within quotation marks.

Sometimes I soar aloft but then, thud, I land back in my flightless day-to-day. Maybe this comes from my mother’s Litvak background. The visiting Litvak, or Lithuanian Jew, always plays the role of the doubter in Chasidic tales, scoffing at the rebbe’s wonders, until he is won over in the end.

Some skepticism is grounded right in our ancient texts. While Talmud tells us that an uninterpreted dream is like a letter left unread, it goes on to say that our dreams are only 1/60th-part prophecy. “Don’t count on your dreams for guidance,” imply the rabbis of antiquity. “The prophecy in them is negligible.” But tantalizingly, negligible is not the same as nonexistent. One-sixtieth is tiny but quantifiable. It’s one minute of every hour you sleep. That’s six, seven, eight minutes of prophecy a night, which really isn’t so bad. But frustratingly, Talmud gives no guidance as to how to identify which eight minutes are gold.

So I dance the dance of paradox. I long for mystical experience, for conversation with God and angels, and visits to non-corporeal realms. I am also quick to pooh-pooh the woo-woo. When I experience something transcendent, my next instinct is to douse the experience in a bucket of cold water. But there are times when the mystical is too pressing, too inexplicable. Which brings me back to this dream.

I woke up and looked out at the blue Mexican water, feeling sad and feeling spoken to. I couldn’t shake the sense that she had just been there, holding me. I posted the dream on Facebook, asking, “How can we ever tell what is a message and what is our imagining?” Instantly people began weighing in. They all said, “Of course it’s a message,” causing me to slam my laptop shut, muttering, “How would you know?”

I got up, dressed, and walked to the mercado for fruit and vegetables. On my way back, I wandered through the old town, wondering how one can ever tell if such an experience is anything more than the heart’s wishful thinking, the brain concocting medicine for a spirit in need of it? I posed the “how can you ever know for sure” question in my head as clearly as one might pose an inquiry to a Magic 8 Ball. If only one could see a sign of some sort! Just as this request for a sign formed on my lips, I looked up and saw one. I was standing in front of Club Mañana, a former dance club and theater where the Kinsey Sicks had performed for several seasons. Mañana was now for sale, and I was staring at the En Venta—the “For Sale” sign. My eyes were drawn down to the large-lettered name of the realtor.

Marilyn Newman.

My mother’s maiden name.

If I’d seen it in a movie, I would have snickered at its heavy-handedness, but in real life I stood there, feeling stupid. That because of my insistent grinchiness, a hello from my mother had to come endorsed with a signature before I could believe it. Was this a coincidence? Of course it was. Might I have noticed this gringa realtor’s name, this ersatz Marilyn Newman, on some other “For Sale” sign in Puerto Vallarta a year or two earlier? I might have noticed it and called my mother on the phone to say, “You’ll never guess what I saw today!” I might have, but I didn’t. I only saw it in the slightly altered consciousness that followed the dream.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav taught that every blade of grass has a song of its own, a melody that comes from the sweetness of the water and the setting of the pasture. The song of the grass informs the song of the sheep that eat it, and the song of the shepherd who spends days lying on it, watching the sheep. Every living thing—no, every thing—has a kind of music that we can hear if we open to it. Meanwhile, Talmud teaches us that no blade of grass grows without an angel standing there, encouraging it, saying, “Grow! Grow!”

These two teachings combine to describe a universe full of aliveness, in which on some level everything is talking to everything. The Divine talks and Creation talks back, in a great, gorgeous cacophony not dissimilar to a Jewish dinner table. If we are in the right state of consciousness, we might hear some of the cross talk that we otherwise would never tune into—the cross talk that sometimes seems to respond to a question in our hearts, or calls us to action when we need it, or calls us to attention at just the right moment.

Sometimes the cross talk of the Universe comes to us in the language of coincidence because it is abundant and we all understand its grammar. Coincidence is the Esperanto of Divine communication. At least that’s my experience. For others it might be quiet insight, and who knows, maybe others hear voices. But coincidence, synchronicity, in my experience, is always worth pausing to notice. 

Or maybe there is no call from the divine. Maybe there is no prophecy in dreams. Maybe coincidence is simply a question of the mathematics of the universe. Maybe all calls, or at least the good ones, come from deep inside, a deep intuition, a place of knowing that sits in our bones and in our kishkes. As they say in the old urban legend, “The call is coming from inside the house.” That would be okay too. Being locally sourced doesn’t prevent us from holding it with the honor that we would if it were undeniably divine. Maybe in holding it that way, it becomes divine.

There is one epilogue to this strange story. Another dream about my mother, but I didn’t dream this one. It was dreamt by an acquaintance and Kinsey Sicks fan who called me urgently one day because my mother had come to him in a dream, asking him to convey a message. I listened to the message, which didn’t feel all that urgent to me, and felt the Litvak in me putting up a wall. Really? I thought. I should believe this why? Not to mention my injured vanity: the nerve of someone else to dream about my mother. In good lawyerly fashion, I asked him why he thought my mother would’ve come to him with a message when she could’ve come to me directly. He said, “Funny, I asked her that. She said that you were so busy, she didn’t want to bother you.” Words my mother had, of course, said to me a million times. Maybe it’s coincidence. Or maybe, like in the Chasidic stories, the skeptical Litvak—the doubter in me—gets won over.

Irwin Keller, EX’85, JD’88, is a rabbi in Sonoma County, California. He is also an alumna of the Kinsey Sicks, America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet. He blogs at irwinkeller.com. “Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of” was first published in Shechinah at the Art Institute (Blue Light Press, 2024).