Dreams

4326 words long.

Published on 2024-04-16

This article shares what the author has learned about how to interpret dreams. The main takeaways are:

Who sent the dream? Not all dreams are messages from God. Learn to discern.
Does the dream align with other sources of wisdom? No valid dream will contradict the Bible.
Does the dream bear good fruit? God means us good. The devil means to destroy.

Types of Dreams

Eighteen books in the Bible speak of dreams. How are dreams regarded by the prophets and apostles?

As a divine promise (Gen 28, 37, 40) or offer (1 Kings 3)
As commands from God to take specific positive action (Matthew 1)
As commands from God to refrain from taking action (Gen 31; Matthew 27)
As warnings from God to save people in danger (Matthew 2)
As predictions of future events, enabling the wise to plan ahead (Gen 31, 41; Judges 7)
As predictions of future judgment, affording the humble opportunity to change course (Gen 20; Daniel 4)
As predictions of unalterable future judgment (Gen 40; Daniel 2; Daniel 7, Revelation)
As clear rebukes from God of past actions, affording the contrite opportunity to repent
As a lesser form of communication than hearing God's direct words (Numbers 12)
As a charismatic gift without regard to what is communicated (Daniel 5; Joel 2; Acts 2)
As unclear nightmares sent by God to correct and rescue those going astray (Job 33)
As nightmares from an unknown source, possibly Satanic (Job 7)
As the day's cares and worries given new form (Ecclesiastes 5)
As a metaphor for transitory, unreliable things easily dispelled (Job 20; Psalms 73, 90; Isaiah 29)
As a metaphor for an impossibly good outcome (Psalm 126)
As romantic longing (Song of Songs 3)
As negligence, asleep on the job (Isaiah 56)
As unwise speculations or leaning on actual dreams not from God (Colossians 2; Jude)
As lies told by false prophets (Deuteronomy 13; Jeremiah 23, 27, 29; Zechariah 10)
As deceptions sent by evil spirits (Job 4)
As suppressed by God in judgment (1 Sam 28)

Dreams are dangerous.

Ignore a true dream from God and you will go astray or lose a blessing.
Misinterpret a dream and you may make a mess of things.
Misuse your dreams in pride to gain status in the church and you will be judged.
Embrace a false dream from the enemy and you place your soul in jeopardy.

With this diversity of the possible species of meaning (or meaninglessness) of dreams, how can anyone safely make use of them? I know of only one person granted the ability to correctly discern the truth from among all these types of dreams.

... and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.

- Daniel 1:17

I am no Daniel. I have not personally experienced all of the types of dream listed above. I have experienced some (actually most of them). God has warned me away from folly. He has warned me of danger. He has prepared me for difficulty. He has disciplined me for not listening. I have also heeded dreams that were not from God and suffered dearly for it. Nightmares from Satan destabilized my emotional life for years. All these experiences have taught me that you must be careful how you interpret and act on dreams. The Bible offers much guidance and we should not neglect it. The most important thing to know is that you should never act solely on the basis of a dream. We are given other sources of wisdom that we must combine with our dreams in order to understand them aright.

The Power of a God-given Dream

Let's start with the up-side. By God's grace, shortly after I became a Christian, I had a powerful and positive dream that permanently changed me for the better. This showed me the promise of what a dream from God can accomplish, but gave me a one-sided view of things that would need correcting later.

It was the fall of 1985. I had just started my undergrad physics thesis. A month before, I joined a good Bible study sponsored by the United Christian Fellowship, a group formed by the merger of several campus Christian groups, including Intervarsity (IVCF). I was struggling as a student and suffering depression, anxiety and other emotional problems. I felt like a failure who had not made any positive contribution to the world. This is called the "existential fear of life", the fear of living a wasted life. I was also afraid of death. My fear of death was closely tied to my fear of life. If I died, my life would have been an incomplete waste of time.

That Fall I had a recurring dream. In the dream, I was in bed, shaving with my electric razor. As I shaved, the razor shorted and I was electrocuted. As the shock passed through my body, I knew I was about to die. However, instead of feeling scared, incomplete or worthless, my last thought as the dream ended was that I was going to be with Jesus. I was filled with peace.

Since that month, I have never been afraid of dying. Nor have I fear that my life is worthless. My ambition was taken from me. I no longer felt the need to strive to be accepted. Jesus accepted me the way I was. Even if I accomplished no more in this life than I already had, it was enough.

I knew that the dream was from the Lord. It changed me. It healed me. It was mysterious. I never thought to question where it came from. Only decades later did I make the connection. A month before the dreams started, my Bible study leader had us memorize a passage from Galatians:

I have been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live,

but Christ who lives in me.

And the life I now live in the flesh I live

by faith in the Son of God, who loved me

and gave himself for me.

I do not nullify the grace of God,

for if righteousness were through the law,

then Christ died for no purpose.

- Galatians 2:20-21

I did not understand the words that I had memorized, but they changed me. Those words are about putting on a new identity in Christ. That new person need fear nothing and is perfect in the eyes of God, accepted and loved and forgiven. That dream was just my heart catching up with what the words were doing inside my soul.

This is the first and most important lesson of dreams:

Does your dream align with the Word of God? Does it leap forth from that Word?

The second lesson is that this dream brought peace. Not all dreams must bring peace. Some are to judge, to discipline, or to warn. They lead to peace only if you heed them.

There is a special reason for mentioning this dream first. It came true twice. It makes me choke up just thinking about it. My father and I had a difficult relationship for decades. In the last decade of his life, things improved markedly and we became close. Even so, I prayed many times for him to soften his anger at God and trust in Jesus. He was raised Catholic but grew bitter in his middle years. He often ridiculed my faith. Towards the end, when his health was failing, he told us not to revive him if anything happened. Then he told my wife on the phone, "God isn't done with me yet." He had a heart attack, but because of what my wife said, we told the doctors to revive him. My dad told us afterwards, "I need to take care of Martha." His wife was in worse shape than him and he would not let go so long as she was alive.

I continued to pray for my father and the Lord led me to the passage about the sheep and the goats. Some of the sheep said, "When did we ever do anything for you?" But Jesus assured them that if they did something good for the least of his brothers, they also did for him. In the last few years of his life, my dad became a father to my wife, whose own father had been cruel. The change in his personality and kindness he showed us was evidence that he was a different man. My wife and I are Jesus' brother and sister, so my father did show the Lord kindness. God gave me peace while reading a book on the doctrine of blessed assurance that my father would go to heaven.

During COVID-19, my dad's condition worsened. I visited him at the hospital. He asked me to do him a favor. He wanted me to fetch his electric razor from his apartment. I got it and recharged or replaced the batteries. I shot a video of him shaving with his razor, sitting on his hospital bed. It is the last picture we have of him before he died a few days later.

God knew. Decades ago, when I first had that dream, God knew. He knew I would one day be in torment over whether my father would go to heaven or not. He gave me a dream about being at peace with Jesus at the hour of my death, with a razor in my hand. It was not enough for God to send me a dream to let me know that MY life was not a waste. He also used the same dream to tell me that my FATHER'S life was not a waste.

That is the good that a dream from God can do. Now, for the bad news.

Dreams and the Occult

As a teen, dreams held a fascination for me. One night I dreamt that a close friend was moving away. The next day at school she told me her family was moving to Virginia.

My grandparents' eccentric neighbor fed my interest. Kay Boardman kept dozens of cats and had a large hand bell collection. She gave me books on the Bermuda Triangle, ESP and astral travel. I followed the visualization exercises in one book. The hardest part was imagining color. This is the trick I figured out. I would imagine the black cards in a deck of playing cards. Then I would work on imagining the hearts and diamonds. Once I could see red, all the other colors followed quickly. It took hours of focus over the course of several weeks, but I was finally able to imagine any still image that I wanted, in broad daylight, with my eyes open. I could make the world disappear.

Once I had managed that, the next thing was capturing motion. Pretty soon I could imagine myself flying over the countryside, looking down on the fields. Then one day, while lying in bed, I repeated this exercise, but it felt different. It was as though my spirit lifted out of my body and hovered near the ceiling. I looked down and could see my body motionless below.

I only did this once. I stopped the visualization exercises and never repeated them. The experience was exciting and mysterious. I wasn't afraid and no one told me to stop. I cannot explain what caused me to lose interest in this occult practice. I was Catholic, but had not yet been born again. The only explanation that makes sense is that God sovereignly took away my interest for my own protection.

Is astral travel real? Or is it a form of self-hypnosis? The answer to that question is immaterial to me. What matters is that I was dabbling in the occult, signaling a willingness to open myself up to forces that I did not understand and which God forbids. I would one day pay a price.

Fast forward about a decade. In my late twenties I read lots of Christian books about the end times, most of shoddy scholarship. I began to have apocalyptic nightmares. Bursting dams swept me away in a flood. Wild animals attacked me. One family member became a drug addict and another left the faith. Christians had to meet in secret to avoid persecution. These nightmares persisted for over a year. It destabilized my life. How do you plan for the future when you think we don't have any?

What if someone back then said that if I didn't like the nightmares, I should just stop having them? I would have gotten angry. I would have claimed it was beyond my power to do that. I would also have been wrong. I would eventually learn two of the causes of my nightmares: pride and my early experiments with the occult. The occult involvement explains the form of my oppression, but it was the pride that caused me to hold onto the nightmares.

What if the nightmares were from God? That would mean that I was hearing messages from God. That would mean I was special. It would give me authority. People would have to listen to me. That pride was the force that kept churning my subconscious and generating those dreams. I was refusing to let go of the torment because my identity was tied up in being someone to whom God speaks via dreams.

Eventually, the nightmares became so severe that I sought help from my pastor, Larry Showalter. He prayed over me, then I left. Then something clicked. God gave me a special wisdom, a way out. Every time I had a nightmare, I would recall the imagery from the dream. I would use a Bible concordance to look up passages with those images and meditate on them. Most of the time the concordance led me to Psalms or Isaiah. I would throw away all meaning from the dream and only focus on the meaning in the Psalm or prophet.

The worse the nightmares became, the more I read the Bible. The more I read the Bible, the more my emotions healed. Eventually the devil gave up.

Of all the torments, the worst was being torn by wild beasts. The verses that comforted me most were these:

And a highway shall be there,

and it shall be called the Way of Holiness;

the unclean shall not pass over it.

It shall belong to those who walk on the way;

even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.

No lion shall be there,

nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;

they shall not be found there,

but the redeemed shall walk there.

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return

and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

they shall obtain gladness and joy,

and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

- Isaiah 35:8-10

The Lord told me that if I pursued holiness I would never have cause to fear the wild beasts of this world.

You would think that this experience would have cured me of my pride and attraction to false dreams. It did not. A few years later (in 1992), in a time of emotional turmoil when my life was spinning out of control, I seized on dreams again to empower me. I was self-deceived. I gave several people advice based on dreams that I had. I was seeing a Christian counselor at the time. I still remember the day that I had the realization that I was a false prophet. I wept, terrified that God would kill me. I begged his forgiveness. I also swore off trying to manipulate others by use of my dreams.

For several years after that, I had no dreams that suggested anything remotely prophetic. This is item #21 on my list, when God suppresses a gift or ability in judgment or for discipline. Then I began to on rare occasions have meaningful dreams, but they are not for others. They were only for me, to warn, guide or encourage me personally. I had failed the test that Paul set forth in Romans 12:

We have different gifts,

according to the grace given to each of us.

If your gift is prophesying,

then prophesy in accordance with your faith;

- Romans 12:6

I thought my faith was strong, but that faith was in myself, not God.

Dream Language

Let's back up. I believe that just as God worked out with Adam what to call all the animals, God establishes a special language to communicate with every person. Part of that language is the symbolism buried in our dreams. As a child, I had a recurring dream. In it, I started to climb the hill behind our house. In most of these dreams, something distracted me and I didn't make it to the top. In a few, I made it to the final crest of the hill and almost saw what lay beyond. This dream came to symbolize to me the journey to reach heaven. I had other dreams that involved deer.

When I began to work on my thesis, I was an emotional wreck facing a very difficult project. I needed a Bible passage to inspire me. Remembering my childhood dreams, I searched a concordance for verses about climbing hills and deer. I found this:

The Lord God is my strength;

He will make my feet like deer’s feet,

And He will make me walk on my high hills.

- Habakkuk 3:19 (NKJV)

I meditated on that verse (and the two preceding it) every day for the next eighteen months. That passage taught me how to praise God in the midst of trials and gave me the strength to climb a pretty high hill (just not one to heaven). That is an example of how God can use our dreams to guide us to the help we need.

By the way, how did I get into MIT in the first place? After filling out the application and the assigned essay, I had extra time. On a lark and just because of the joy of it, I wrote a second essay on a topic of my own choosing. I had no indication that an extra essay would sway the admissions office, but it did. My freshman advisor told me years later that the Institute was trying to broaden their candidate pool by seeking students with good writing ability, not just math skills. Even after all that time, he still remembered my college application essay. Considering the thousands of essays that they have to read, that is saying something. What was that essay about? It was about going on a walk up that same hill behind our house with my dog Donner when I was four. So thinking about climbing that hill both got me into MIT (with the essay) and helped me graduate (giving me inspiring words on which to meditate).

God helps us climb difficult hills so that we may achieve our dreams.

In accordance with my faith

In the mid 1990's I had a dream in which my car's brakes gave out. I took my car to the shop the next day; both rear and front brakes were seriously worn. This is not a great miracle. Perhaps my subconscious noticed something off with my car and it was not God at all. This simple dream is more important to me than all the rest because I took it as a sign of God's forgiveness. We were on speaking terms again. It was a small test of whether I could handle dreams without going off the deep end. I passed.

It would be almost a decade before I would have another.

Seek Confirmation

My recollection is fuzzy, but I think it was Fall 2003 when I had the most significant dream of my life. My family and I were driving in our car when a tornado stormed by. It lifted our car up, then slammed it down. Up, down, up, down. I lost count of how many times it happened. Then the storm ended and we drove on in safety.

I would have forgotten that dream, but for the sermon I heard that weekend. My daughters were attending a Christian school run by the International Family Church in Winchester, so I went to their church service one night. A visiting pastor gave a message about Jesus calming the storm. He said that most sermons you hear about that event go on about how Jesus was teaching his disciples how to have faith. He said his was different. It wasn't about the disciples at all. On the other side of the lake were two demon-possessed men desperately in need of a savior. The only way to get there in time was to cross the lake in a storm.

I immediately made the connection to my dream. The Lord was telling me that my family and I would go through a long series of trials but God would see us through. Then, when I reached "the other side of the lake", God would have something useful for me to do. The first disaster struck three days later (a house fire) and our difficulties continued for about nineteen years.

Several of the Bible figures in the passages listed at the top of this article asked God for secondary confirmation before taking action. Is that a sign of doubt or of wisdom? Given my missteps with dreams early on, I am glad that God confirmed my dream with that sermon. During all those years of unemployment, utilities turned off, health problems, disagreements at church, family squabbles, and many other issues, I held onto that dream and that sermon as a promise that we would survive.

“I have told you these things,

so that in me you may have peace.

In this world you will have trouble.

But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

- John 16:33 (NIV)

Jesus told us to expect troubles. Couldn't I just have trusted what he said in John 16? There is a difference. If God just wanted to prepare me for trials lasting until the day I die and enter heaven, John 16 works fine. However, if he wanted to give a message detailed enough to let me know that a long series of trials would both come and end, a personal message was essential. Otherwise, how would I know when I am ready to take up the unspecified task that he is using those trials to prepare me for? Also, how would I know what it is that I am supposed to do?

What to do. The task is still coming into focus, but it involves the Book of Job. My dream featured a tornado, and Job's trials began and ended with whirlwinds. Over the last six or seven years, large parts of the three most recent books that I have written concern Job.

When to do it. The Lord used the sermon to confirm that the trials were about to begin. He also used it to tell me how to recognize when they had run their course. On December 26, 2022, I was skating with my daughter on Winter Pond in Winchester. I fell through thin ice and needed to be rescued. When Erica Poitras and the rest of the rescue team pulled me from the freezing waters onto the shore, it was like the disciples reaching the other side of the lake in the story of Jesus calming the storm.

As I fell through the ice, I fractured my upper humerus. Dr. David Alessandro repaired my right arm, using a plate, seven screws and a band. The surgery was performed at Winchester Hospital's Ambulatory Surgery Center on Washington Street in Winchester. That surgery center is built on the grounds once owned by the International Family Church. On the same spot that I heard the sermon that confirmed my trials would soon begin, that season of trials ended under a doctor's scalpel.

That skating accident is the only time during those two decades that my life was in real jeopardy. Only God could bring those trials to such a fitting and poetic climax. By such means and such dreams, the Lord tells me that my life has meaning. I may not know what that meaning is for long stretches of time, but if I wait, it will come.

Dare to Dream

I trust that I have communicated the promise and the peril of reading too much into dreams. If you read the Bible passages on dreams at the top of this article, you will find real wisdom. May my personal anecdotes, as incomplete as they are in their coverage of this topic, help you wrestle with your dreams. To get where I am today, I had to grow spiritually and face my pride and folly with tears of repentance. It is the same with every spiritual gift. They are not toys.

Links to the other articles in this section:

Spiritual Growth Introduction to the articles about spiritual growth.

What are Life's Twelve Most Important Questions? If you can answer these questions, you know the way better than the Mandelorian.

What are the Heavenly Treasures? It is one thing to list these treasures, quite another to acquire them!

The Harvest Pattern of Jesus A tactical pattern for overcoming an individual obstacle and reaping a single spiritual harvest.

The Growth Pattern of Solomon A strategic pattern to help you plan your whole life.

The Motherhood Pattern A strategic pattern for women.

The Law Pattern of Moses The law does more than restrict; it also guides.

The Journey Pattern It is a long journey back to Eden.

Emotional Prophecies of the Psalms

Job and the Ways to Talk to God

Job Description for a Savior Job knew what he needed in a savior. Do you?

Dreams Dreams can guide you, paralyze you, or lead you astray. In my case, it was all three.

Spiritual Warfare Somebody IS out to get you.