BP84
Charles Spurgeon once said, I have little confidence in those persons who speak of having received direct revelations from the Lord, as though he appeared otherwise than by and through the gospel. His Word is so full, so perfect, that for God to make any fresh revelation to you or me is quite needless. To do so would be to put dishonor on the perfection of that Word.
I fully agree with Spurgeon that the Bible is our only source of truth on the level of the written word. I wholly embrace Sola scriptura, the doctrine that the Scriptures are the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice.
I also believe that the Holy Spirit, on occasion, may speak to an individual through a prophetic word delivered, possibly, even through a dream. I do not want to limit God who can choose to speak to us at any time and through any medium. However, I would urge people to use extreme caution when assuming that a dream is from God. Almost always, dreams are leakage from our own unconscious minds.
So, what is a good rule of thumb when dealing with dreams?
Repetitive dreams often have significance. A seven-year-old boy, Sam, had a repetitive dream of Frankenstein’s 8’ tall monster stomping up the steps from the basement toward his bedroom. Often, the hideous creature came thumping down the hallway that led to his bedroom but never quite reached the boy’s door. It wasn’t until he was a grown man that he realized that the monster’s scary presence in his dreams represented his fear of his rageaholic father.
Beginning as a teenager, Jamie had repeated dreams of trying to scream but she could not get any words out. Something always prevented her from speaking. When she was 30 years old, she began to recover memories of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her grandparents. It was only then that she remembered her grandfather placing his hand over her mouth so she could not cry for help while he was abusing her.
Dreams, then, sometimes are actual memories that gurgle up from the deep recesses of the mind. Sometimes these memories are hazy. Sometimes, the antagonist from the past is camouflaged as a monster or another person. Frequently, these dreams are leakage from the young self within who carries secrets and terrors and beliefs that were formed before age ten or eight or five.
Whenever someone presents a dream to me, I listen for three things, namely, themes, emotions, and how it ends.
One example of a theme is powerlessness. Jim dreamed only occasionally but often it was about him attempting to complete a task or master something but always being frustrated in his efforts. If he was driving his car through the snow, he would always get stuck. If he was trying to take a test at school, his pencil lead would keep breaking off. If he tried to walk toward a group of friends, they would suddenly walk away, and he could never catch up to them.
Other dream themes might pertain to being lost, or perceiving parents as weak, or perceiving oneself as a bad and shameful person as manifested in frequently breaking something or hurting someone in the dream world.
Look for themes in your dreams. They might be telling you something.
Emotions in dreams might be more easily identified than themes. Some common emotions that appear in dreams are fear, sadness, loneliness, and anger (rage). Often, these emotions had to be suppressed because they could not be experienced as children but then later leak out in the safer world of dreams.
Possibly, someone threatened the child that if she told the secret she or her loved ones would be punished or killed. Other times, the parent was too fragile to allow the emotions of their child to exist—especially anger—so the child learned to hide feelings because they might break or destroy the parent if they freely displayed them. The child might even be rejected or shunned for any emotion expressed that might wound the hypersensitive parent.
The silent treatment has great shaming power with most children.
Alice Miller addresses this suppression of a child’s self and emotions when she writes, One serious consequence of this early adaptation [taking care of the insecure, fragile parent] is the impossibility of consciously experiencing certain feelings of his own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, impotence, anxiety) either in childhood or later in adulthood.
She goes on to say, If this [person] had been able as a child to express his disappointment with his mother—to experience his rage and anger—he could have stayed alive. But that would have led to the loss of his mother’s love, and that, for a child, is the same as object loss and death. So he “killed” his anger and with it a part of himself in order to preserve his . . . mother.
My point here is that emotions that cannot be expressed in the real world often leak out while the person is asleep. Sometimes, the people who appear in a dream are not clearly recognized but often the emotions are identifiable. If a certain emotion shows up repeatedly in your dreams, listen to that emotion and try to discern where it is coming from and how its suppression might impact your honesty when it comes to speaking the truth in love (especially if anger is involved).
A third factor to look for in dreams is the ending. One man had a dream that he lost his three-year-old daughter while attending a public event. He was beside himself with terror and searched all over for her. The last thing he remembered in the dream was finding his daughter. Then he woke up.
This type of conclusion to a dream—an ending that is characterized by satisfaction, completion, relief, mastery, hope, peace, not being alone, being rescued—indicates that the dreamer has at least some belief that his bad circumstances will be resolved or that he will be saved from danger. If most of your dreams end before any satisfactory conclusion occurs, it might be an indication that you are more pessimistic about bad events in your life ending well or that there is something lingering in your life that needs resolution.
Some dreams are classics, so to speak. Michael had one of them.
This young man who had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder had a dream that he was flying with his mother in a C-5 Galaxy, a huge USAF cargo plane. His mother was dressed only in her undergarments and was oblivious to the world around her while she gazed into a mirror applying makeup.
While Michael was sitting in the cargo bay with his distracted mother, he suddenly wondered who was flying the plane. When he made his way to the front of the aircraft, he found no pilots in the cockpit. He and his mother were the only ones in a plane being flown by no one.
This dream was easily interpreted by Michael. He had grown up without a father and had always felt responsible for his mother who was emotionally young and not very capable of doing adult life. The half-dressed mother in his dream sitting in the cargo area of the plane instead of in the cockpit clearly represented Michael’s experience of his parent in the waking world: she was not strong enough to face the challenges of life and certainly not in charge of her flight path (or that of her son). No wonder the young man had learned anxiety in his youth.
Some individuals have repetitive violent dreams. For instance, Carrie dreamed at least once a week that she was being chased on foot by a man carrying a shotgun. In the dream, she was terrified, convinced that she would be killed. On a few occasions, she was shot but woke up before she died.
Sometimes, such a violent dream can point to abuse the individual experienced as a youth. In Carrie’s case, however, therapy revealed a different truth: her fear of being chased and killed was a subconscious coping skill. It was actually her who felt angry enough to kill. The focus of her intense emotion was her boyfriend who cheated on her.
Carrie’s violent anger was so unacceptable to her Christian values that she had to project her violent emotion into someone else in her dream world. Then she could conclude that someone was trying to hurt her instead of the truth that her vengeful rage desired to make her boyfriend pay for his unfaithfulness.
If some of you see the roots of paranoia in projection, I don’t think you’re wrong.
I am convinced that other dreams intersect with spiritual darkness. These nightmares often end with the dreamer waking up and sensing a presence in the room–a frightening presence. Yes, this presence could be a flashback to childhood abuse, but often I believe it is a dark being who has appeared under the cover of darkness to instill fear and anxiety in the vulnerable sleeper.
When some individuals experience a dark dream and awaken to a spiritual presence, they feel it in their body. Chills run up and down their spine. They feel the hair on the back of their neck stand up. Sometimes, their whole body feels hypervigilant and full of electricity.
The point here is that some dreams seem to open a portal to darkness. As unnerving as these dreams can be, some people are strangely energized by them because they feel like the existence of Satan has been outed. Believers often then respond by calling out to Jesus for help and remind themselves that He who is in them is greater than he who is in the world. Jesus’ presence can be experienced very powerfully in such moments. 
It is not uncommon for some individuals to come to therapy and report themes in their dreams of danger, powerlessness, defeat, and even death. One seven-year-old boy, Eusebio, whose mother had experienced a complicated tonsillectomy recovery with excessive bleeding and had to be whisked to the hospital in an ambulance on several occasions, was referred to the school counselor.
The distraught boy told the counselor that he was experiencing terrible nightmares about death. He drew picture after picture of a guillotine cutting off people’s heads. Red crayon blood was scribbled all over the paper. He also drew images of a woman dressed in a white dress with blood all over her garment—undoubtedly his mother.
The nightmares and bloody pictures continued for weeks. But gradually, as the boy came to weekly counseling at his grade school and experienced the presence of a reassuring man, the nightmares began to downgrade to dreams and the bloody guillotines were accompanied by less violent images.
On the last day of school when counseling ended, Eusebio drew one final picture for the school counselor. It depicted a man’s head broken open and out of it flowed gold coins and food and toys. It was like an image of a cranial cornucopia. Blood was entirely absent from this picture. He gave it to the school counselor with a smile on his face and announced, “This is you.”
This amazing picture, an outward representation of the healing of his nightmares, did not represent violence or fear but new themes of strength and safety.
As you may have guessed, I was the counselor who had the privilege to work with that traumatized boy in Los Angeles. His dreams and pictures were the most vivid example I have ever seen in my practice of what I call reparative dreams. Just as the name suggests, reparative dreams are those that reveal a pattern of healing within an individual. Eusebio’s dreams progressed from blood and death to peace and freedom from anxiety.
Much could be said here about Jesus and dreams. I will limit my comments to two things as I close.
First, Jesus has given us His Holy Spirit who lives within us. The Spirit is with us as a divine counselor even in our subconscious world of dreams and nightmares. Reassuringly, the Psalmist writes, Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
No matter where your waking experiences or your dreams take you, God will be there with you. Remember that truth. Call on Him immediately when you have disturbing themes, emotions, and endings in your subconscious world.
Second, there have been studies published (Dudley Woodberry and others) and data gathered by mission agencies that recount many stories of Muslims meeting Jesus in their dreams. Mission Frontiers magazine reports that 25% of 600 Muslim converts had a dream of Jesus that led to their conversion. Apparently, God still speaks occasionally through dreams–even to unbelievers.
My concluding advice is to ask Jesus to speak to you even in your subconscious world. Implore Him to meet you in the darkness of the night and fill your dreams with His presence. I believe this prayer will be answered more often if the last thing you do as you fall asleep is to read Scripture, worship, and pray. God shows Himself to those who seek Him earnestly, even in the watches of the night.
And God spoke to Israel in visions of the night and said, “Jacob, Jacob.” And he said, “Here I am” ~ Genesis 46:2
For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear ~ Ecclesiastes 5:7
And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams ~ Acts 2:17