Synopsis
This essay begins from the dream-saturated narratives of Vayetze, Vayeshev, and Miketz—Jacob’s ladder, Joseph’s dreams, and the dreams of Pharaoh and his ministers—and asks a radical question: what if the entire universe is one continuous dream of the Creator? Drawing a historical arc from Plotinus and Avicenna through Ramak, Lurianic Kabbalah, and up to Schrödinger, the essay shows that both philosophers and mystics have imagined creation not as an object external to G-d, but as an imaginal world arising within the divine mind. In Kabbalistic and Chassidic terms, G-d “dreams” the worlds into being; this dream state enables cognitive dissociation between Creator and creation, making genuine otherness and companionship possible.
The essay then brings in contemporary neuroscience and cosmology. Borrowing from Erik Hoel’s Overfitted Brain Hypothesis, it proposes that dreams inject “noise” into an otherwise overfitted system; by analogy, G-d’s dream includes built-in randomness so that the world is not rigidly deterministic but open to novelty, emergence, and free will. Modern cosmology’s combination of low-entropy initial conditions with quantum fluctuations is read as a physical echo of this blend of order and noise. On this basis, the essay revisits the problem of evil: natural tragedies and seemingly purposeless suffering are interpreted not as what G-d positively desires, but as structural costs of an open, entropic creation that can sustain real freedom and moral significance. This view finds support in the Luarianic doctrin of two universes, Tohu and Tikun, hinted at in the Torah portion of Vayishlaḥ.
Finally, the essay reconciles this entropic framework with the doctrine of divine providence (hashgachah pratit). Drawing on classical Chabad sources, it argues that specific divine providence operates through continuous creation and the sustaining of laws, possibilities, and pathways, rather than crude micromanagement of every physical detail. An excursus compares the four worlds of Atzilut, Beriyah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah with the four stages of human sleep, and the “neuronal avalanches” that mediate transitions between sleep states with tzimtzum and other critical transitions in the unfolding of the worlds. The essay concludes that to “live in the dream” is to awaken within G-d’s ongoing creative imagination, embracing both order and unpredictability as the medium of relationship, responsibility, and spiritual growth.
In the previous Torah portion, Vayetze, we read about Jacob’s dream:
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of G-d ascending and descending on it (Genesis 28:12).
In the portion Vayeshev, we encounter Joseph’s dreams:
And Joseph dreamed a dream… And he dreamed yet another dream (Genesis 37:5–9),
followed by the dreams of Pharaoh’s ministers:
And they dreamed a dream both of them, each man his dream in one night (Genesis 40:5),
and later, in the portion of Mikeits, Pharaoh himself:
And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed (Genesis 41:1).
It is all about dreams. What if the whole universe is one continuous dream of the Creator? Does G-d dream us into existence? I think so. This is what this essay is about.
Introduction: From Plotinus to Schrödinger
It has often been said—by mystics, philosophers, and poets—that the universe exists in the mind of G‑d. The Zohar states it explicitly:[1]
The world came into being from maḥshavah (“thought”)… Everything is sustained in thought, which is the secret of the concealed mind. (Zohar I:15a–b)
To me, this always suggested something stronger: not merely that G‑d thinks the universe into existence, but that G‑d dreams (“the secret of the concealed mind”) it into existence. The image of a divine dreamer has always felt intuitively right, as if it captures something essential about the fluidity, creativity, and radical contingency of being.
The idea that the universe emerges as a kind of dream within the divine mind is not a recent intuition, nor a marginal poetic flourish. It is a recurring motif in Western metaphysics, articulated by some of the most rigorous thinkers from late antiquity to modern physics. Already in antiquity, philosophers were grappling with the problem of how multiplicity can arise from an ultimate unity. Again and again, they turned to the language of imagination, image, and dream.
Although Plato himself does not use the word “dream” for creation, Neoplatonists do, based on the Timaeus model of the demiurge forming the cosmos as a living image. Plotinus (204–270 CE), the founder of Neoplatonism, provides the earliest systematic expression of this idea.[2] In the Enneads (c. 253–270 CE), he describes all of reality as “the images in Intellect,” comparing the emanation of the cosmos to “the images in a dream” that arise spontaneously within the mind:
The images in Intellect are like the images in a dream… the universe itself is such an image. Enneads (V.8.13)
For Plotinus, the universe is not crafted by external effort but radiates from the inner life of the divine, much as a dream radiates from the interiority of the dreamer. This becomes a foundational metaphor for understanding the world as ontologically dependent on the divine consciousness, yet possessing its own internally coherent structure.
Avicenna (also known as Ibn Sīnā, 980 to 1037 CE), in his magnum opus Kitāb al-Shifā (The Book of Healing), written between roughly 1014 and 1020 CE, states:[3]
The First’s knowledge is the cause of being, as a dream-image arises in the soul. (Metaphysics, IX)
Medieval Jewish thinkers engaged these themes, often transforming them through the categories of Kabbalah. R’ Moses Cordovero (the Ramak) draws the parallel explicitly describing G‑d’s creative act as “the imagination of a dream”:[4]
The Creator brings forth worlds through the power of keter… in the form of hirhur, like the imagination of a dream (k’koach ha-medameh shel ḥalom). (Pardes Rimonim, Sha’ar 3, ch. 4)
All worlds, he writes, emerge from the contemplative power of the supernal mind, in a process that precedes conscious articulation.
Lurianic Kabbalah deepens this intuition: R. Ḥayyim Vital teaches in Etz Ḥayyim (Heichal A”K, Sha’ar 1) that the worlds originally exist only as dimyonot—imaginal forms—within the Ein Sof, becoming actual only after passing through a kind of divine concealment:[5]
All the worlds first existed only as dimyon (imagination, dream-like state) within the Ein Sof. (Etz Ḥayyim, Heichal A”K, Sha’ar 1)
In this lineage, the universe is not a construction external to G‑d but a projection of inner divine life, analogous to the way a dream arises within the sleeper without diminishing its felt reality.
Medieval Jewish philosopher Gersonides (Ralbag) compares creation to the mind’s imagination, producing images analogous to dreaming.[6] Ḥasdai Crescas echoes this thought.[7]
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov echoes the sleep metaphor:[8]
The entire world is like a dream… just as in a dream one sees things without substance. (Likkutei Moharan I:64)
Rabbi Tzadok ha-Kohen of Lublin, the student of the first Izhbitzer Rebbe, is the most explicit Jewish mystical source to say that the world emerges from G‑d’s dream:[9]
Creation occurs in the aspect of sleep, as it were… the Holy One, blessed be He, dreams the worlds before they come into actuality, and from this dream the worlds emerge.
With the arrival of modernity, the metaphor re-emerges in unexpected places.[10] Leibniz uses the metaphor to justify contingency and freedom.[11] Continental philosopher Schelling, in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), writes that “Nature is the dream of Spirit,” and that consciousness itself awakens by passing through this dream-state. For Schelling, dreaming becomes the necessary medium through which spirit objectifies itself without collapsing the distinction between subject and world.[12] Novalis, the Romantic poet-philosopher, sharpened the point: “The world is the dream of G‑d” (fragment 17), a formulation that entered both mystical and philosophical discourse.[13] Schopenhauer compares the world-as-Will-and-Representation to a dream experienced by a cosmic mind.[14] Similar metaphors are used in the Eastern philosophical traditions.[15]
A century later, the metaphor appears again, this time in the writing of a theoretical physicist. One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, deeply influenced by German Idealism, also describes the world as arising within a single universal consciousness. In My View of the World (ch. 4), he writes that “the world is a dream dreamed by a single consciousness,” suggesting that multiplicity is a projection within a unified field of mind.[16] For Schrödinger, this is not theology but metaphysics—an attempt to reconcile quantum physics with the problem of the observer.
Across these centuries, the same intuition recurs: the universe is not merely known by G‑d—it unfolds within G‑d. Creation, in this lineage, is not the building of an external object but the emergence of an imaginal world within a conscious source.
It is against this backdrop that I wish to revisit the metaphor of creation as the divine dream—not as an idle poetic flourish, but as a serious metaphysical and theological model for understanding concealment, otherness, free will, theodicy, and the dynamic unfolding of creation.
This provocative dream metaphor begs a deeper question: Why speak of creation as divine dreaming rather than thinking? What work does the metaphor of sleep actually do?
I offer two answers. One is ancient, psychological, and relational. The other is contemporary, computational, and entropic. Together, they gesture toward a unified picture in which theology, Kabbalah, and neuroscience converge on a single idea: the world arises from a conscious act that must, paradoxically, conceal its own authorship.
1. The Dream of Companionship
The first answer begins with a simple intuition: G‑d longed for companionship.
This is not to say that G‑d lacked anything in the classical sense. Rather, creation reflects a divine desire to be known, recognized, and loved by beings whose relationship with G‑d would be freely chosen. The Torah is unambiguous on this point. G‑d refers to the Jewish people as my bride,[17] my beloved,[18] my sister,[19] my brother,[20] companion,[21] and my friend.[22] These are relational metaphors that speak of companionship, mutuality, not unilateral authorship. To be sure, G‑d, who is perfect and lacks nothing, did not lack companionship; he invented a desire for companionship, which we—created in His image and His likeness—inherited from Him.
But one cannot be one’s own bride, friend, or partner. Genuine companionship requires otherness. It requires a being that is not simply an extension of oneself. So, the challenge is clear: How does an infinite, omnipresent Creator bring into existence a creature capable of relating to G‑d as an other, rather than as a puppet or projection?
This requires, at a minimum, a deliberate act of cognitive dissociation.
Dreaming provides a perfect metaphor for this disassociation. When a person dreams, they invent an entire world—its characters, its drama, its scenery—yet remain unaware of being its author. The dreamer watches the dream unfold as if it comes from elsewhere, even though every detail flows from the dreamer’s own mind. The dream-state thus simulates otherness. Modern neuroscience supports this notion. Van Heugten, van der Kloet & Lynn (2020) write that “Dreaming itself fulfills certain criteria of dissociation… both involve disruptions in the normal integration of thoughts, feelings, and experiences into consciousness.”[23] See also Hasko & Feigenbaum (2019).[24]
Creation, in this reading, is G‑d’s dream. The world is the narrative that unfolds, and we—its inhabitants—are the characters who live, breathe, and choose. The concealment of divine authorship is not a bug but a feature. It is the necessary precondition for a relationship. Only within the dream can the beloved appear as distinct, can love be freely offered and freely received.
2. The Dream of Entropy: Overfitting and Divine Noise
The second reason is even more intriguing, emerging not from theology but from computational neuroscience.
Erik Hoel’s Overfitted Brain Hypothesis[25] proposes that dreaming exists to prevent neural networks—biological or artificial—from overfitting their training data. The problem is clear: a system that perfectly memorizes its past becomes unable to generalize to new situations. To stay adaptable, it needs exposure to novelty, absurdity, and randomness.[26]
The solution is noise.
Dreams inject noise and entropy into the brain. They generate hallucinated, chaotic scenarios that break the rigid patterns of the waking mind. Through this deliberate destabilization, the system maintains flexibility and creative capacity.
If we apply this idea theologically, a fascinating possibility emerges: What if G‑d uses dreaming to inject noise into creation? Perhaps the divine dream is not a serene, static vision but a deliberate entropic process—G‑d generating a universe with built-in randomness so that genuine freedom can exist.
A somewhat similar pattern emerges in modern cosmology, where the universe displays a striking combination of primordial order and fundamental randomness. As Roger Penrose and others have emphasized, the Big Bang begins in an extraordinarily fine-tuned, low-entropy state—an initial smoothness and suppression of gravitational degrees of freedom that remains one of the deepest puzzles in physics. This improbable order functions like the coherent background of a dream: a stable, intelligible canvas upon which anything further can occur. Yet layered atop this order is genuine indeterminacy, for the early universe is seeded with microscopic quantum fluctuations that inflation magnifies into the large-scale structures of galaxies and clusters. In this sense, cosmology mirrors the theological model suggested here: creation begins with an ordered foundation that makes a world possible at all, but it also contains an injected randomness that makes stars and galaxies possible. The divine dream, then, is not a static vision but a dynamic process in which initial coherence and primordial entropy cooperate—order establishing a meaningful stage, and randomness opening space for genuine emergence.
Theologically, this aligns with a fundamental paradox: How can free will exist if G‑d’s knowledge is perfect and all-encompassing? Traditional answers invoke G‑d’s timelessness or the distinction between foreknowledge and coercion. Chassidic philosophy of Chabad suggests that higher knowledge (da’at elyon) and lower knowledge (da’at taḥton) exist in parallel universes, as it were, and do not interfere with one another. But Hoel’s theory suggests something different: perhaps randomness—noise—is part of the fabric of creation precisely so that human choice remains indeterminate to allow for free will.
In this reading, creation itself functions like a divine neural network, where dreaming is the process by which cosmic entropy is injected into that network, and randomness becomes the very condition that makes genuine free will possible. G‑d’s dream is not the elimination of order but the balancing of order and chaos. Enough structure for the world to be coherent; enough randomness for creatures to be free.
This parallels a well-known theme in Kabbalah: the world is built from the tension between din (constraint) and ḥesed (kindness, expansive creativity). Too much order leads to collapse; too much chaos leads to dissolution—both dominated the universe of Tohu, resulting in the shattering of its vessels (shevirat ha-kelim). The biblical metaphor for that is the eight kings of Edom, who all died one after another (Genesis 36:31). Dreaming is the mechanism for keeping the system alive, flexible, dynamic, and open-ended—the universe of Tikun, seeded with the shards of the broken vessels of Tohu to inject noise and entropy.
3. The Kings of Edom and the World of Tohu: Broken Vessels and Holy Noise
There is a curious passage in the Torah portion of Vayishlaḥ, sandwiched between the “dream” portions: Vayetze, with Jacob’s ladder, and Vayeshev and Miketz, with the dreams of Joseph, Pharaoh’s ministers, and Pharaoh himself. In the middle of this dream-saturated narrative, the Torah pauses to list the “kings who reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned a king over the children of Israel” (Genesis 36:31).
One after another, each of the eight kings “reigned” and then “died.” On the surface, this appears to be dry genealogy; in the eyes of the Kabbalists, it is nothing less than a cryptic code for the primordial catastrophe of the universe of Tohu.
The Zohar and, most systematically, the Arizal read these kings as the sefirot of the world of Tohu. In the Idra Rabba of the Zohar (“The Great Assembly”), the text speaks of the Ancient of Ancients” who “prepared forms,” shaping and sparking kings that “could not endure,” and then explicitly links these to “the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned a king over the children of Israel.” Bereshit Rabbah famously comments that “the Holy One, blessed be He, was building worlds and destroying them until He created this one and said: This one pleases Me; those did not please Me.” The Arizal makes the connection exact. In Etz Ḥayyim, Sha’ar HaMelakhim (Gate of the Kings), Ari’s student R’ Ḥayyim Vital explains that these Edomite kings correspond to the sefirot of the world of Nekudim—Olam ha-Tohu—and that their “death” is the shattering of the vessels (shevirat ha-kelim), when great lights encountered vessels too small to contain them.
The Torah’s phrasing is precise. It does not say that each king “lived and died,” as in a simple chronological obituary, but that each “reigned and died.” The Kabbalists infer that no two kings could reign together: as long as one ruled, no other could be manifest. Only when one “died” could the next “reign.” This super-rigid succession is read as a political metaphor for a metaphysical condition: in Tohu, each sefirah stands alone, in a strict vertical hierarchy, one beneath the other, without the lateral integration and mutual mitigation that characterize the world of Tikun. Except for Ḥokhmah and Binah, which are somewhat interrelated (“two companions that never part”), the lower eight sefirot in Tohu “light up” one by one, each in absolute self-assertion, and each in turn collapses under the intensity of its own unconstrained light. A king reigned, and he died; a sefirah shone, and its vessel shattered.
This is why, paradoxically, Olam ha-Tohu is not “chaos” in the colloquial sense of randomness or disorder. On the contrary, it is too ordered—too rigid. It is like a skyscraper built to outdated codes, fixed to the bedrock with no capacity to sway: elegant on paper, but doomed when an earthquake hits. In modern engineering, tall buildings in seismic zones are placed on rollers and flexible bases precisely so that they can move without collapsing. Tohu is the brittle, rigid tower: the lights are immense, the vessels are fixed and narrow. There is no give in the system, no flexibility, no capacity to absorb and redistribute intensity. Under the strain of the Ein Sof’s light, the vessels shatter.
So why is Tohu called the “world of chaos”? Because we never encounter Tohu in its pristine, hyper-ordered state. What we experience are its fragments. When the vessels of Tohu shattered, their shards, charged with immense spiritual energy, “fell” into the emerging world of Tikun. From our perspective, we see broken pieces randomly scattered throughout reality, generating distortion, turbulence, and conflict. The chaos belongs not to the original configuration of Tohu but to the pattern of its debris in Tikun. The world of Tikun is built on the rubble of Tohu.
Kabbalah and Ḥasidut describe these fallen shards as the roots of evil. The more exalted their origin, the lower they fall—just as a stone dropped from a great height hits the ground with greater force and sinks deeper into the ground. In our world, these shards become the kelipot, the “husks” and shells in which the lofty sparks of Tohu are trapped. Our cosmic mission is to liberate these sparks through mitzvot, good deeds, and refining the world. When a spark is freed from its husk and elevated to its source, the immense energy of Tohu is released in a rectified form. The raw power of Tohu could be likened to uncontrolled nuclear energy, bursting forth in a destructive explosion; the task of Tikun is to harness that same power, as a fusion reactor would—channeled, contained, yet unimaginably potent.
The Arizal emphasizes that holiness is always associated with seder—order and integration—whereas evil is associated with division, confusion, and chaos. The shards of the broken vessels of Tohu are unholy not because their origin is low, but precisely because their origin is so high that, when broken, they descend into disordered configurations that no longer transparently reveal their source. They appear to us as noise, as entropy—random disturbances in an otherwise coherent system. Yet, and here is the crucial point for our purposes, it is precisely the infusion of this “noise” that gives the world of Tikun the flexibility it needs to endure.
Read this way, the doctrine of Tohu and breaking of the vessels (shevirat ha-kelim) becomes a deep Kabbalistic analogue to the entropic “noise” we invoked in the context of the divine dream. A perfectly rigid world, crystallized around a single pattern with no internal flexibility (no noise), cannot survive—or at least cannot host a living, developing creation. It would be like an over-fit neural network that lost its predictive power. Such a world will shatter under its own light. A world that contains within itself shards of Tohu—random pockets of chaos, zones of unpredictability, energies waiting to be released—has the very tension it needs to remain alive, dynamic, and open-ended. The broken vessels of Tohu seed Tikun with the possibility of disruption, and therefore with the possibility of growth.
Thus, what first appeared as a radical speculation—that G-d “dreams” the world into existence (rather than simply thinking it), in order to infuse creation with noise and randomness, thereby making room for free will—turns out to have a solid foundation in mainstream Kabbalah and Ḥasidut. The world of Tohu, with its exclusive rulers-kings and collapsing vessels, and the world of Tikun, built from their shards, already embody a cosmic drama of order and chaos, intensity and flexibility, light and noise. The divine dream of creation, on this reading, is nothing other than the ongoing work of Tikun: G-d continuously reimagining the world in such a way that the infinite light of Ein Sof can be present without breaking reality, precisely by allowing a measured degree of randomness, fracture, and contingency into the system.
4. The Synthesis: Dream as Creative Frontier
We can now appreciate why the metaphor of divine dreaming is both ancient and modern.
The dream provides a frame for:
- otherness (companionship)
- concealment (the possibility of a relationship)
- randomness (the possibility of freedom)
- creativity (constant re-interpretation of the world)
- flexibility (avoidance of metaphysical overfitting)
The dream is the ideal metaphor because it preserves paradox. The dream both conceals and reveals. It both determines and liberates. It both originates in the dreamer and yet feels independent of the dreamer. It is the perfect tool for a Creator who wishes to be known and yet remain hidden, who wishes to endow creatures with freedom and yet infuse the world with purpose.
Perhaps this is why the Sages speak of G‑d as constantly renewing the work of creation.[27] A dream is not a fixed image but an unfolding process. Creation, too, is dynamic, fluid, and evolving—an ever-changing story told by a divine mind that remains lovingly invested in its characters.
5. Excursus: Four Worlds and Four Stages of Sleep
If creation is G-d’s dream, we can ask a natural follow-up question: can the structure of human sleep itself illuminate the structure of the divine dream? “…In my flesh I shall see G-d.” (Job 19:26) Contemporary neuroscience divides sleep into four main stages—N1, N2, N3, and REM—each with distinct patterns of brain activity and degrees of disconnection from waking consciousness. Kabbalah, for its part, speaks of four worlds—Atzilut, Beriyah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah—emerging through successive contractions (tzimtzumim), each representing a further “descent” of divine revelation into structured, differentiated existence. As much as it is tempting to line these up in a one-to-one mapping, as though N1 corresponds to Asiyah, N2 to Yetzirah, N3 to Beriyah, and REM to Atzilut, that would be too literal and ultimately arbitrary. The logic of sleep stages is not identical to the inner logic of the worlds. What we can say, however, is that the very idea of sleep unfolding through qualitatively different stages offers a useful image for how a single divine “sleep” could give rise to multiple ontological levels.
In both schemas, we move from a relatively integrated state toward regimes of deeper separation and internal processing. In the four worlds, Atzilut is closest to divine unity; Asiyah is furthest, the world of action, thickness, and concealment. In sleep, the transition from wakefulness into N1, N2, and N3 corresponds to increasing disconnection from the external environment and deeper immersion in internally generated activity. REM sleep, with its paradoxical combination of cortical activation and sensory disconnection, is particularly suggestive as an analogue: a state in which intense, symbolically rich imagery arises from within, unconstrained by external input. Without insisting on a strict mapping, we might say that the four worlds and the four sleep stages both testify to a structural intuition: that consciousness—divine or human—can manifest in distinct modes, each with its own balance of unity and multiplicity, openness and closure, receptivity and self-expression.
Modern sleep science adds another layer to the metaphor. Transitions between waking and sleep, and between different sleep stages, are increasingly understood in terms of critical dynamics in large-scale brain networks: cascades of activity, “neuronal avalanches,” shifts in synchronization and connectivity that reorganize the brain’s operating regime. These are not gentle slides so much as threshold-crossing events in a complex system. Kabbalah describes the emergence of the four worlds in surprisingly similar language. The primordial tzimtzum, the shevirat ha-kelim of Tohu, and the subsequent tzimtzumim that structure Tikun are likewise critical transitions—points at which the mode of divine manifestation changes qualitatively, giving rise to new “regimes” of being. To speak of neuronal avalanches and tzimtzum in the same breath is not to claim they are identical phenomena, but to notice that both describe reality as moving between patterned states through cascades and thresholds rather than via smooth, linear interpolation.
Seen this way, the mapping between the four worlds and the four stages of sleep is best understood not as a tight identification but as a useful metaphor. It reminds us that the divine dream may have internal structure; that concealment and revelation, unity and differentiation, may themselves come in layers. It suggests that the passage from infinity to finitude, from Atzilut down to Asiyah, is more like the brain traversing different regimes of activity in the course of a night than like a single mechanical switch. The analogy is modest but fruitful: it does not tell us which sleep stage corresponds to which world, but it does encourage us to think of creation as a layered, dynamically shifting dream—one in which changes of state, both above and below, are marked by critical transitions (“avalanches”) rather than by smooth evolution. It also prepares us to ask how such a dream can contain the very real experience of suffering and evil.
6. The Problem of Evil
The “problem of evil” is the philosophical and theological challenge of explaining how a world containing suffering, injustice, and apparent purposeless tragedy can coexist with an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good G‑d. Atheists invariably raise the problem of evil in an attempt to discredit theism. Theodicy is the attempt to justify the goodness and omnipotence of G‑d in the face of the existence of evil.[28]
Classical Jewish thought offers several approaches to explaining human suffering. One recurrent theme is that suffering is not a punishment, but rather a cleansing of the soul in this world that prepares it for eternal bliss in the world to come. Another theme centers on the concept of gilgul (reincarnation), in which suffering is seen as an opportunity to repair misdeeds from previous lives. Chassidic thought further teaches that while revealed goodness flows through the lower two letters of the Tetragrammaton (vav–heh), yissurim (suffering) are a form of hidden goodness rooted in a higher source, in the first two letters (yud–heh) (Tanya). The perspective I propose here does not displace these theodicies, but adds a complementary layer by reading suffering through the lens of the divine dream and the entropic “noise” woven into creation.
If creation is understood as a kind of divine dream, continuously renewed yet intentionally infused with entropy, then the classical problem of evil appears in a new light. The seeming purposelessness of certain events—a fawn burning in a forest fire, the arbitrary destruction of an earthquake, or the cruelty of illness—need not be attributed to a divine will that intends such suffering. Instead, they emerge from the same entropic openness that makes this world capable of freedom, creativity, and moral significance. A world without randomness would be overfitted, locked into rigid determinism, incapable of novelty or genuine moral agency. Just as the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis teaches that noise is necessary for learning, adaptation, and flexibility, a world without metaphysical “noise” would be stunted, frozen, and spiritually inert. The tragedies that arise from this openness are not expressions of what G‑d really wants, but reflections of the structural conditions G‑d establishes so that a world containing real freedom, real development, and real relationship can exist at all.
In this sense, natural evils are not divine punishments or expressions of cosmic intent; they are the unavoidable byproducts of a creation that is permitted to evolve, differentiate, and unfold according to laws that allow for contingency. A simple biological metaphor can help understand this. On the one hand, genetic mutations are necessary for species adaptability and diversity; on the other hand, they are the unfortunate cause of aging and genetic diseases. G‑d wills the possibility of emergence, not the disasters themselves. The divine dream includes a lawful, coherent structure, but also the indeterminacy that prevents the world from collapsing into static perfection—an overfitted universe that would permit neither free will nor moral growth. The very elements that make the world meaningful—the capacity for choice, the unpredictability that allows moral courage, the dynamism of unfolding history—also create the conditions in which some events occur without discernible higher purpose. Evil, in this framework, is the shadow side of freedom: not divinely authored in its particulars, but permitted as an unavoidable feature of a universe designed for relationship rather than automation.
This approach fits well with the Lurianic doctrine of shevirat ha-kelim (the shattering of the vessels) in the world of Tohu. Just as the shards of the broken vessels of Tohu inject noise, uncertainty, and pockets of chaos into the world of Tikun, the metaphor of divine dreaming offers another way to understand a similar infusion of noise and chaos into creation. And just as shevirat ha-kelim is often treated as the ultimate Kabbalistic root of natural disasters and seemingly senseless tragedies, G-d forbid, so too the “noise” injected by the divine dream can serve as an analogous explanatory framework on the level of theology and lived experience.
7. Reconciling Entropic Creation with Hashgachah Pratit
At first glance, the idea that G-d introduces genuine randomness into creation—an entropic openness necessary for freedom and contingency—seems difficult to reconcile with one of the fundamental doctrines of Judaism: specific divine providence (hashgachah pratit), the doctrine that every particular detail of creation is governed by it. If the world contains real indeterminacy, real spontaneity, and real unpredictability, how can every detail also be known, willed, and overseen by its Creator? Yet this tension dissolves once we understand the Chabad conception of providence, which differs sharply from the naïve caricature of a G‑d who mechanically coordinates events according to a predetermined script. Divine providence in Chabad thought is not divine micromanagement but divine presence—ongoing creative attention expressed through the constant renewal of being.
This approach preserves both divine goodness and divine transcendence. Chassidic teachings insist that G-d is present in every detail of creation, sustaining each moment of existence through the divine speech that continually brings the world into being. The Baal Shem Tov, therefore, teaches that even the fall of a leaf is encompassed by hashgachah pratit. Yet this does not mean that G-d scripts the physical configuration of each event as a discrete intention. Rather, divine providence operates through the continuous will that sustains the laws, potentials, and pathways through which the world unfolds. The existence of openness, indeterminacy, and even random physical outcomes is itself part of the divine intention: G-d wills a world in which nature operates according to stable laws, in which freedom and emergence are possible, and in which His providence governs the whole without negating the local conditions that allow contingency to exist. Providence governs the whole, not by scripting every event, but by establishing the conditions under which meaningful life can emerge. G‑d desires a world in which creatures can choose, grow, fail, return, and love—and such a world cannot be sterilized of randomness without collapsing into determinism. For better or for worse, the dream requires both its order and its noise.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi establishes this foundation explicitly in Tanya. In Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah,[29] he argues that creation is not a one-time event; the divine speech that brings the world into existence must be continuously present at every moment. At every moment, G‑d renews the world ex nihilo (yesh m’ayin—something from nothing), recreating both its lawful regularities and its possibilities. Without this perpetual influx of divine vitality, all things would instantly revert to absolute nothingness. This “continuous creation” means that providence is not something added to nature but something identical with the very fact that the world persists through continuous recreation. Existence itself is the first act of providence. Because the divine word does not simply originate the cosmos but sustains it from moment to moment, providence becomes the metaphysical condition for anything to exist, change, or act at all.
This view is further developed in Chassidic works, such as Derech Mitzvotekha by the Tzemach Tzedek.[30] There, providence is described not as a sequence of divine interventions but as the continuous alignment between divine will (ratzon) and the unfolding of creation. The Tzemach Tzedek emphasizes that divine attention flows through the perpetual renewal of being (hithadshut tamid). Specific divine providence (hashgachah pratit) is thus not primarily causal micromanagement but ontological dependence: every detail is noticed by G-d because every detail exists only by virtue of His ongoing creative act.
The Mitteler Rebbe, in his discourses (“ma’amarim”) on divine unity, stresses that providence operates through the inner vitality (chayut penimiut) that structures each level of existence according to its capacity to receive the divine light. In this framework, the divine relation to randomness is not adversarial but foundational: the very openness of contingent processes is something renewed by G-d at each moment.
Furthermore, randomness becomes a portal for divine providence. Seen this way, randomness does not negate providence; it expresses it. Quantum indeterminacy, statistical unpredictability, and the apparent contingencies of lived history are not flaws in the divine order but reflections of the order G-d chose to create—a world in which autonomy, moral responsibility, novelty, and emergence are not only possible but desired. Chabad metaphysics teaches that divine will encompasses not only outcomes but modalities: G-d wills a world in which certain domains are inherently open, where possibilities are genuine and not illusory, and where human choice participates in shaping the trajectory of creation. Providence, then, is not the override of randomness but the ground within which randomness is meaningful. It is G-d’s will that the world contains both fixed laws and indeterminate processes; both boundary conditions and freedom; both stable form and emergent variation. These paired elements correspond, in classical Chassidic language, to din and chesed, gevurah and hispashtut—constraint and creativity woven together into a single fabric of being.
Modern physics provides a helpful metaphorical parallel. Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity—contraria sunt complementa—teaches that certain descriptions of reality, though mutually exclusive, are jointly necessary for a complete account of physical phenomena. Light is both a particle and a wave; its nature depends on the mode of observation. In a similar sense, providence and randomness are opposite but complementary perspectives within a single divine design. From the inner divine standpoint, so to speak, creation is continuously sustained, known, and willed in every detail. From within creation’s own horizon, however, reality presents itself as probabilistic, open-ended, and responsive to free agency. One description does not negate the other; rather, each expresses a different aspect of a system grounded in a higher unity. The seeming contradiction between divine governance and cosmic openness is not a flaw but a reflection of the deep structure of being. Just as Bohr’s complementarity, and in Chabad thought the parallel of da’at elyon and da’at taḥton, presents two irreducible yet jointly necessary perspectives on a single underlying reality, so too providence and randomness can be seen as complementary descriptions of one divine design.
Providence thus operates not by dictating the microscopic outcomes of every fluctuation, nor by collapsing the space of possibility into a single deterministic line, but by shaping the overarching architecture within which all events unfold. G-d establishes the laws, the symmetries, the boundary conditions, and the continual creative influx that sustain both order and indeterminacy. The divine dream contains both stability and surprise: it is governed as a whole by G-d’s intention, yet spacious enough internally for emergence, development, and freedom. In the cosmic dance between Creator and creation, G-d does not choreograph every step; He provides the music, the space, and the invitation—while letting humanity lead the dance.
Conclusion: Living in the Dream
If the world is G‑d’s dream, then our lives become simultaneously more mysterious and more intimate.
We are characters in a story, which we, yet endowed with free will, participate in writing. We live within a narrative, yet capable of surprising even its Author. We are dreamed into existence, yet fully real within the dream. And G‑d—far from being distant—is the very consciousness within which our existence unfolds.
Perhaps the purpose of life is not to awaken out of the dream, but to awaken within it—to recognize our place in the divine imagination, and to respond with creativity, responsibility, and love. To awaken within the dream is to practice is to rectify this world and make it a dira betachtonim—a dwelling place for G-d—revealing the Dreamer precisely within the most concrete, physical details of ordinary life.
[1] Zohar I:15a–b (Pritzker ed.)
[2] Plotinus, Enneads V.8.13.
[3] Avicenna, Kitāb al-Shifā (The Book of Healing), Metaphysics, IX.
[4] Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (Ramak), Pardes Rimonim, Sha’ar 3, ch. 4.
[5] Rabbi Ḥayyim Vital, Etz Ḥayyim, Heichal A”K, Sha’ar 1.
[6] Gersonides (Ralbag), Milḥamot Ha-Shem, Book III, Pt. 2, where he writes, “G‑d’s knowledge generates the forms of the world as the imagination creates its images.”
[7] Ḥasdai Crescas, Or Hashem (II:1), where he describes creation as emerging from G‑d’s will imagining possibilities, again a proto-dream metaphor: “The possibilities of creation are known to G‑d as imaginations (dimyonot).”
[8] Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Likkutei Moharan I:64. Though he stops short of saying “G‑d dreams,” later Breslov commentators (R. Nosson, L.M. Tinyana 10) connect this directly to divine consciousness.
[9] Rabbi Tzadok ha-Kohen of Lublin, Resisei Layla, §54 (also cf. §56, §58); see also Pri Tzadik, Bereshit §3, where he writes, “All existence comes from the hidden thought (machshavah) which is like a dream before awakening.”
[10] Baruch Spinoza compares finite existence to “imaginations in the mind of G‑d.” Ethics II, Prop. 3, Scholium. Early follower, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) (e.g., Novalis) made this explicit: “We are dreams in the mind of Spinoza’s G‑d.”
[11] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) writes in the letter to Arnauld (9 Oct. 1687): “Created substances exist in the mind of God as the ideas of a dreamer.”
[12] Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (German Idealist), System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800).
[13] Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Novalis: Philosophical Writings, ed. Stoljar, fragment 17.
[14] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation I, §5, where he writes, ‘Life and dreams are pages of the same book… the world is the dream of the Will.”
[15] In Vedantic cosmology, Aurobindo describes the universe as Ishvara’s “cosmic dream” generating multiplicity. See Sri Aurobindo (Hindu Vedanta), The Life Divine, ch. 13, where he writes, “The world is the dream of the Lord… a dream that creates and sustains its own reality”; classical Advaita explicitly compares creation to the Lord’s dream: “As in dream, the mind projects a world… So too the Lord projects the waking world.” In Sufi Mysticism, Ibn ‘Arabi frequently calls creation a dream within divine consciousness: “Creation is the dream of God… and we are His imagining.” Futūḥāt al-Makkiyyah III:346.
[16] Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, ch. 4.
[17] See Exodus 24:7–8; Jeremiah 3:14; Isaiah 54:5; Hosea 2:19–20; Ezekiel 16:8; and Song of Songs 4:9–10, 5:1.
[18] Jeremiah 12:7; Song of Songs 2:16.
[19] Song of Songs 4:9–10, 5:1.
[20] Midrash Tanḥuma (Naso 16).
[21] Isaiah 62:5.
[22] Isaiah 41:8; 2 Chronicles 20:7.
[23] Van Heugten, van der Kloet & Lynn (2020), Frontiers in Psychology, 11:745.
[24] Hasko & Feigenbaum (2019), In Histories of Dreams and Dreaming (Springer). ““Several aspects of dreaming may be considered within the dissociative framework.”
[25] Hoel, E. (2020). The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization. arXiv:2007.09560 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560).
[26] A similar situation arises in curve fitting, a predictive technique that fits a continuous curve over discrete data points. In quantitative finance, practitioners who attempted to use curve-fitting to predict stock market behavior discovered a paradox: the better the curve fit historical data, the less predictive power it had for future performance. This phenomenon, known as overfitting, occurs when a model captures noise and idiosyncratic patterns in past data rather than underlying market dynamics, leading to poor generalization and unreliable forecasts in live trading environments. See https://www.quantifiedstrategies.com/curve-fitting-trading/.
[27] See Midrash Tanḥuma, Parashat Noaḥ, §3Baal Shem Tov, Keter Shem Tov, §1 and §338; Rabbi Dov Ber, Magid of Mezeritch, Maggid Devarav le-Yaakov, §28 and §64; Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyadi, Tanya, Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah, Chapter 1.
[28] The term was coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his 1710 work Essais de Théodicée, where he argued that this is “the best of all possible worlds” despite the presence of suffering and evil.
[29] Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyadi, Tanya, Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah, ch. 3.
[30] Rabbi Menachem Mendel, the Tzemach Tzedek, Derech Mitzvotekha (mitzvat ha-amanah b-Elokut).