In Your Dreams

"In Your Dreams"
Job 33:15-18


I switched topics this week.  My dream a couple of weeks ago about Gordon Stull getting an exotic illness, the only symptom being, it makes you buy books for no reason, got me thinking about dreams.  What they are.  Why do we have them?  And more importantly, how does God use them?

We spend more of our lives sleeping than anything else.  30 to 35% of our lives are spent asleep.  About 25 years, if you live to be 75.  25 years asleep!  Sounds like a lot of time wasted for how little of it we get in this life.  But if we try to totally deprive ourselves of sleep, we’d last about four weeks--about the same amount of time we can go without food.  No sleep means death.

And during all that time asleep, of course, we dream. All kinds of dreams.  Some are sheer entertainment.  We have a lot of disjointed thoughts and impressions floating around in our minds.  During sleep, sometimes all that unconnected stuff gets connected in weird ways that make perfect sense in dreams, but not when we wake up.

There are a lot of dreams recorded in the Bible.  Joseph had a dream that his father and brothers would one day bow down to him, represented by sheaves of wheat.

Once thrown in prison in Egypt, the royal baker and butler each had dreams, and Joseph, who was also in prison, interpreted their dreams.  Which gave Joseph a face-to-face with Pharaoh, who also had a dream about cows, which represented seven abundant years and seven years of famine.  Joseph told Pharaoh, “Do not interpretations belong to God?”

The same thing happens to the prophet, Daniel, who ends up interpreting King Nebuchadnezer’s dream about the giant statue made out of different metals.  Daniel, in a Joseph kind of statement, tells the king, “...but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries…” (Daniel 2:28).

In the book of Matthew, we have Joseph getting a string of dreams guiding him through his feelings about Mary and her pregnancy.

The apostle Paul has a dream that directs him to go over to Macedonia to preach the gospel, and opens the way for his missionary journeys.

Dreams, as Joseph and Daniel say, are mysteries.  In the Bible, both the giving and meaning of dreams, are seen as one of the main ways that God communicates with people.  When you think about it, dreams come when your conscious mind is basically disconnected.  All your logic and reasoning is suspended while you sleep.  Your self-styled defense systems that you use extensively while awake, have had their wires cut by God while you sleep.  God can get at you in your dreams, and you can do nothing about it.  We are all defenseless before God when we sleep.  And God seems to like it that way.

Morton Kelsey has written extensively about the Christian spiritual life.  I don’t agree with everything he writes about, because he’s a bit too “new age” for me.  But one of the ideas he has written about has to do with the spiritual world and our everyday world.  Kelsey thinks the spiritual world serves as a foundation of our everyday world.  The two can come into contact with each other, forming connections, or easy bridges between the two worlds.  Especially in dreaming.

Psalm 16:7 says,
I shall bless the LORD who has given me counsel;
in the night he imparts wisdom to my inmost being. (REB)

And the verses from Job 33, read earlier:
In dreams, in visions of the night,
when deepest slumber falls on mortals,
while they lie asleep in bed
God imparts his message...

God has a way, through our dreams, of getting in touch with us, cutting through to parts of ourselves that we’d maybe rather leave hidden, parts of our waking world lives that we’d rather avoid.  And whether we’d like to admit it or not, a large part of our avoidance behavior while we’re awake has to do with God.  But when you fall asleep, and when you dream, God’s got you!  And there’s nothing you can do about it.

The language God uses in dreams is largely symbolic.  Like poetry.  In a sense, God makes us all into poets when we sleep and dream, filling us with poetic imagery.  As you can imagine, these symbols and imagery in our dreaming are specific to the individual and can’t be standardized or universalized for everyone.

The problem with that, is the more we move into a technological and scientific way of being, we lose the ability to value and understand the symbolic.  Behind symbols lies a kind of power that evokes feelings.  Strong feelings.  That’s what God is after in our dreaming.  To get a hold of us to the core of our feelings, hoping to evoke some change or insight.  For example, if your marriage is in trouble, you may dream of an earthquake where all the buildings around you--all that is supposedly substantial in your life--are shaking and breaking apart.  You may think you just had a scary dream about an earthquake, but it may go much deeper than that.

Here’s another fun example of that.  Elias Howe spent many years trying to perfect his sewing machine.  But he was stumped about how to attach the thread to the needle.  Then he had a dream.  In the dream he was given 24 hours to complete his invention.  If he failed, he’d be killed by cannibals with their deadly spears.

Howe worked feverishly to meet the deadline, but still couldn’t overcome that one obstacle of the needle.  The cannibals surrounded him and slowly raised their spears.  As they got closer and closer, Howe noticed that all the spears had small holes in their tips.  He woke up sweating--but still alive.  And now he knew what to do. He’d put a hole in the end of the needle!

Now God may not be trying to get you attention about some invention.  As I said, the Holy Spirit puts us in touch, through our dreams, with the images that have the power to get our attention for God.  So these images, and the attention they gain, have to do with a lot of things from God.

First, God uses dreams to reassure us.  These kinds of dreams, through their imagery are trying to let us know we can trust God, that we can be encouraged by what God may or may not be doing, which in turn gives us a sense of fearlessness.

When my daughter Kristin was about four or five, she woke up, and bounded down the stairs to tell me about a dream she had.  She said God came down to her room and played with her.  And then God took her up to heaven and played with her up there.

What a great dream!  She was excited by it.  But it had the opposite effect on me as it did on her.  For her it gave her a tremendous childlike trust in God.  But for me, I wondered almost instantly if God was preparing her for her imminent death.  Preparing me, possibly, for her early death.  For a little over a year, I lived in fear that there was going to be something that happened that would take Kristin away, by death.  I never told her of my fear.  I became very overprotective, that year especially.

Finally God got a hold of me and asked me, since I couldn’t let go of my fear over Kristin’s dream, if I could trust him with Kristin’s life.  And with Ryan’s life.  I suddenly realized, as parents, we all have to come to that place of entrustment--of giving our children’s lives over to God, even and especially when they are alive.  Then, perchance they do die, then we know into whose hands their lives have gone.  It became a very important dream--even though it wasn’t my own--that brought me to the place of reassurance that in life and death, my children were always in God’s hands.

Secondly, there are dreams God sends that guide us.  The guidance in these dreams may have to do with our true identity in God.  We may be really confused about who we are, and who we were meant to be, compared to who we are turning out to be.

Or we may be struggling with our calling, and what it is that God meant us to do in life.  I talked about that a couple of weeks ago.  Larry Culliford, in his article, “Powerful Dreams” told about one of these kinds of dreams that he had.  This is how he described it:

In the dream, I was in a damp, grey, barren landscape of vast horizons under a dark, cloudy sky. I was holding a prospecting hammer. Over my shoulder, there was a collecting sack. In the far distance, I could see just two or three isolated figures, heads bowed like mine, eyes down towards the ground. I was strolling beside a fast-flowing stream, one of several criss-crossing the desolate area. At first I felt lost, unsure of what I was doing or seeking. Soon, however, I stopped, noticing a small, beautiful, teardrop-shaped ingot of purest gold in the mud at my feet. Dislodging it easily with the hammer, I picked it up and placed it in my bag. Immediately, I noticed another of these small but perfect golden teardrops, then another. I knew somehow that I could reap this treasure because I could see it, whereas most others could not. People were away in the towns nearby, enjoying themselves, and had set aside all interest in prospecting – in seeking their true prospects. Their vision for such things had atrophied.  (Larry Culliford, “Powerful Dreams” in Psychology Today)

Culliford realized from his dream what he was to do with his life was close at hand.  That he had to look in the “mud”, not in the clear running water of the stream.  That there were “prospects” that God wanted him to see for his life.  Everyone else was lost in mediocrity.  But when he got down into the mud, he found the unexpected--his true life and true self and true mission.

Emily Bronte has her heroine, Cathy, in Wuthering Heights, say, “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”  Those are the kind of dreams God uses to help get your attention about who you are and where you’re going in life.


Thirdly, dreams seem to increase when we are doing some hard work of self-examination.  Dreams allow God to get into our emotional and psychological selves in the safe place of our dreams.  Our defenses are down, and God can tell us some things in no uncertain terms.  God will always tell us the truth, especially if we are paying attention in our dreams.

Roy Fairchild, late professor of Pastoral Care and Spiritual Direction at San Francisco Theological Seminary, told a story at a workshop I attended about a dream he had.  He had been deeply depressed for months.  He had to take time off from teaching at the seminary.

One night he had a dream.  He was building a house.  He was making a poor job of it.  Studs not straight.  Bent nails everywhere.  It was a recurring dream.  Same kind of poor construction, time after time, night after night.  With each segment of the dream, frustration grew.  Depression deepened.  But at one point a carpenter showed up to help.  Together they straightened the studs.  The form of the house started taking shape.  They put the ceiling joists on.  The house was coming together.

Fairchild was telling his spiritual guide about this recurring dream, and how he could not make sense of it.  The therapist asked, “Do you know any carpenters?”
“That’s just it; I don’t,” said Fairchild.
The therapist then asked, “Wasn’t Jesus a carpenter?”

All of a sudden it all started to make sense.  Jesus was helping him rebuild his life, one task at a time.  Fairchild realized he was trying to put his life back together all by himself.  He had totally ignored Christ in that process.  The more he tried to do everything without Christ, the bigger the mess.  God was letting him know, through the imagery of building a house, that if he, Fairchild, let Christ help, his life would get rebuilt.  Everything changed after that.


There are all kinds of other reasons God gets our attention through our dreams.  To warn us of danger.  To give us commands in no uncertain terms.  To create wisdom, and solve problems.  Dreaming increases when we are learning new things--and maybe God is a part of that as well.  And God can use dreams to help us respond to threats in our lives--triggering our fight or flight responses.

In all of those, pay attention.  Pay attention to the imagery.  Pay attention to what God is trying to get across to you when your defenses are down.

J.M. Barrie, in his book, Peter Pan, has Tinkerbell say to Peter, “You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place you can still remember dreaming?  That’s where I’ll always think of you.”  In our dreaming, that’s what God is ultimately telling us--I’m always thinking of you, and trying to make connection to you.  So sleep, and be ready.