How can I "grep" patterns across multiple lines?

It seems I am misusing grep/egrep. I was trying to search for strings in multiple line and could not find a match while I know that what I'm looking for should match. Originally I thought that my regexes were wrong but I eventually read that these tools operate per line (also my regexes were so trivial it could not be the issue). So which tool would one use to search patterns across multiple lines?