How God Speaks through Dreams

Understanding the hidden language of the soul

Thanks for all the comments many of you have emailed to me personally, but it would be great for you to post instead on the public comments at the bottom of the page. That way, we can all be a part of this growing community of readers.

Does God speak through dreams?

Many people would answer yes. But when you drill down into the specifics of how God may do that, things get complicated. The obvious problem is interpreting the meaning of the figures, landscapes, actions and scenes that show up in our dreams—they usually appear in other guise than they do in our waking life. But the greater problem is how to respond to whatever message we believe our dreams are trying to convey.

Still, dreams matter because they sometimes show us truths that we can’t or won’t express to ourselves in our waking life. On a deeper level they may connect us with God, who rules both our waking and our sleeping.

That was the experience of a friend, a man named Ed. He gave me permission to share his story.

Ed and his wife Susie were one of those couples that every church needs more of. While key leaders in our overall ministry, their larger impact was as role models for the many younger families in our congregation. Ed was a faithful husband who adored his wife. Susie was a beautiful woman with a great sense of humor who loved Jesus. They made Christian marriage look easy.

When I came to be their pastor several years ago, Ed and Susie’s professional careers were winding down and they were looking forward to a comfortable retirement of spending time with one another, visiting their grandchildren more often and travelling to see the places they’d always dreamed of. The next few decades looked to be golden.

Those plans fell apart when Susie developed several physical symptoms in quick succession. They began with a worrisome pain in her side. Then a fatigue that wouldn’t go away. Blurred vision was next. Finally, after several doctor’s visits and a full range of tests, the couple received the feared diagnosis—a fast-growing cancer that had already metastasized throughout her body. As far as medical science was concerned, Susie had only a short time left to live. Of course, the people in our church began to pray. We believe in the power of God and through the years have seen him work miracles of healing in response to prayer. We expected to see him do it again for Susie and Ed. But not this time, and a short time after her first symptoms appeared Susie was gone.

Spiritual maturity is no guarantee that life’s griefs won’t affect your emotional balance; and following his wife’s death, Ed found himself in a lonely, bitter place. The future plans he had carefully laid out were ashes. He was hurt by trusting in a God who seem to have failed him.

But then Ed had a dream—and what God showed him in the dream turned everything around for him. In his dream, Ed saw his wife not as the suffering cancer patient she was before she died but as the beautiful and healthy young woman she had been when they first married. Sitting at ease beneath a structure of some sort, Susie smiled at him with a look of perfect joy and peace.

Ed couldn’t see how his dream fit into biblical teaching, so a few weeks later he shared it with me. As he related the details, I sensed the Lord giving an interpretation based on Psalm 91:1, “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.”

“Susie is in the presence of the Lord,” I told Ed. “And the expression you saw on her face reflects the contentment she has there.” He nodded his head. “I thought it might be something like that,” he said.

Then the Holy Spirit nudged me with an additional encouragement. “And the structure she sat under is the spiritual covering you provided for her as a husband through your marriage,” I told him. “As a godly husband, you helped fit her for glory and the Lord wants you to know that you did your work well.”

His dream’s interpretation comforted Ed and in the months that followed he was able to reclaim his spiritual and emotional equilibrium. He went back to teaching his Sunday School class. Ate dinner with friends. Travelled to see family. But his story didn’t end with just a return to normal life because God began to work in Ed’s grief in some unexpected ways. Through a series of meetings and conversations that could only have been by divine appointment, Ed started a Bible study with a small group of high school boys. It later morphed into a one-on-one discipling ministry that meets at the church. Today you can find Ed and whatever young man he’s mentoring at the moment sitting in a Sunday School classroom one day a week, reading through the Bible together talking through the challenges of living for the Lord.

According to the Bible, Ed’s dream wasn’t an outlier but a common experience.

For example, Joseph the son of Israel and the center of more attention in the book of Genesis than any other Patriarch (Joseph’s story takes up the last third of the book), was known as a “dreamer.” His own dreams as well as his ability to interpret the dreams of others were a constant means of communication from God.

Later in the Old Testament, Daniel is noted for his dreams. A Jewish immigrant in Babylon who rose to the highest levels of political infulence, Daniel’s life as well as the fate of the nations he was connected with were guided by God through his dreams:

In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel saw a dream and visions in his head as he lay in his bed. Then he wrote down the dream and told the sum of the matter. (Daniel 7:1-2)

Joseph the earthly father of Jesus was warned by an angel in a dream to flee Nazereth during Herod’s persecution of infants.

The apostle Paul had a dream that redirected his missionary journey from what is today northern Turkey toward Greece, a dream that changed the geographical course of the progress of the gospel from Asia to Europe.

Peter in his Pentecost sermon declared that the arrival of the Holy Spirit caused “old men to dream dreams.”

The wife of Pilate, the Roman governor sitting in judgement over Jesus during his trial, was warned in a dream that her husband should not convict him.

Of course, the modern world doesn’t accept the biblical perspective and explains dreams in far different ways.

The scientific explanation for dreams basically views dreaming as the brain’s data dump:

…as the neocortex fires during sleep, it signals various regions in the hippocampus to upload whatever information they’ve been holding in short-term storage. The hippocampus is then cleared to gather more the next day, while the neocortex decides what to transfer to long-term memory and what to discard. As that data streams by on the computer screen of the sleeping mind, some of it gets snatched up and randomly stitched into the crazy quilt of dreams, which often only vaguely resemble the literal content of the information.

Psychology believes dreams have other orgins. For example, Sigmund Freud considered them essentially repressed conflicts, usually centered around sexual issues. Carl Jung claimed dreams were the result of our deepest thoughts and emotions being reframed as narratives by the sleeping mind.

But for those with a religious perspective, dreams represent more than modern science accepts. They also have a spiritual dimension that can convey messages our soul longs to hear. The question is how we can understand what God may be saying to us through our dreams.

Christian psychologist and spiritual director David Benner gives some direction in his book Sacred Companions. According to him, we should view our dreams as a story or a movie and look for the underlying plot line. The best way to do this is by writing it down in a journal or discussing it with a friend, like Ed did with me, praying that God will help you understand whatever message your dream was communicating to you. Benner suggests four steps to follow:

First, your dream needs a title. So either at the beginning of the process of interpretation or toward the end when you have a clearer idea of what was going on in your dream, write down a title. That little act by itself will help you grasp the larger spiritual dimensions.

Second, describe in a single phrase the main point of your dream. Just as any story has a simple plot, so do our dreams. Who were the figures? What was the action? What was the result?

Third, keep track of the emotions you experienced during the dream. Were you joyous, happy or excited? Or were you anxious, worried and fearful? Dreams take us deeper than our rational minds, and emotions are often a key to unlocking their message.

Fourth, what unanwered question is there from your dream? According to Benner:

There’s going to be a point of tension in a dream, something that’s not resolved, something that doesn’t make sense. There might be more than one question, but write down one or two key questions about the dream. These are your discernment points. Hold these before the Lord and ask him to speak to you.

Does God speak through dreams? I have a friend, a missionary serving in a Muslim country in Central Asia, who would answer with a confident Yes.

A man in the country where my friend lives recently invited him and his wife to a dinner at their home. When they arrived they were suprised to find not just the host and his wife but all their extended family as well. It was a large crowd.

After the introductions, the host turned to my friend and said, “Tell us!”

My friend was unsure what he meant. “Tell you what?”

“For the last three weeks,” the host replied, “I’ve dreamed of a man in shining clothes who perfectly described your physical appearance. He said you would come to my house with a message.”

“Please tell us what this message is.”

My friend had no doubt that in the mysterious ways God often speaks through dreams—an experience well known by Christian missionaries in Muslim countries—the host’s dreams were in fact the preparation for the gospel message, a message my friend was eager to share.