Dreams, Visions And Experiencing God

God Dreams

NON-SYMBOLIC DREAMS

Does God speak to His people in dreams? You bet He does! We have a lot of Bible precedence where God used dreams to communicate with people.

Does that mean that all of our dreams are God speaking to us? The answer to that question is, "Of course not!"

God can and does speak to us in dreams. But not all of our dreams come from God. There are two other sources that dreams can come from: the devil and our own hearts. We will talk more about that in a few minutes. But first, let's look at the dreams that do come from God.

Some God-breathed dreams can be so realistic that we truly don't know if we were dreaming or if we were in a vision. I had a dream like that, and I had slightly different versions of that same dream multiple times. In the dream, I was around some people who had died, and God raised them from the dead. The dream was awesome and I believe the reason God gave me that dream was so I could challenge the Western church to allow the Lord to grow our faith so we could walk in that sort of thing.

And over the past three or four years, we have started hearing reports of God speaking to unbelievers in modern-day literal dreams. Reports have come from various ministries of Muslims knocking at missionary's doors and asking to be told the Gospel. When they were asked what made them come and ask about the gospel, many different people replied with more or less same answer. "We had a dream and a man in the dream told us to come to you and ask you to tell us about the Gospel."

Apparently God is giving dreams to unsaved people, instructing them to go to a believer and ask to hear about Jesus. And these unsaved men and women are heeding their dreams and actually doing this. God can, and does, use literal dreams to His glory.

SYMBOLIC DREAMS

God also gives dreams that are highly symbolic. In fact, many of the dreams in the Bible were symbolic in nature. When God wanted to warn the Pharaoh about the upcoming famine, he used a symbolic dream. This is recorded in Genesis 41:1-7. The Pharaoh understood that God was trying to tell him something, but he did not understand the meaning of the dream. So he was diligent to try to understand it, even to the point of bringing Joseph out of prison to interpret it for him.

Lets look at another symbolic dream from Judges 7:13-15. God had drafted an unwilling Gideon to deliver his people from the enemy. Gideon had this little tiny army and the forces that opposed him were so massive they could not be counted. That situation left Gideon feeling frightened, until he overheard one man tell his dream to another man (verse 13). "I had a dream. A round loaf of barley bread came tumbling into the Midianite camp. It struck the tent with such force that the tent overturned and collapsed." (It's hard to imagine that overhearing one soldier tell this particular dream to another soldier would build confidence in Gideon.) But the other soldier offered this interpretation (verse 14): "This can be nothing other than the sword of Gideon son of Joash, the Israelite. God has given the Midianites and the whole camp into his hands."

If someone told me that dream, I would have probably thought "Oh brother!" But that is not the effect this had on Gideon. Verse 15 tells us, "When Gideon heard the dream and its interpretation, he worshiped God. He returned to the camp of Israel and called out, 'Get up! The Lord has given the Midianite camp into your hands.'" If you read the rest of the story, you will find out that God did indeed give the victory to Gideon's tiny army.

Isn't it amazing that the impetus that God used to inspire faith in Gideon so he would go fight the battle was a symbolic dream? God can (and does) speak to us in dreams -- even symbolic ones.

Other Dreams

DREAMS FROM OUR OWN HEART/MIND

Not all dreams are from God. Sometimes they are from our own minds as we process something, or even from a physiological stimulus. A person who is worried about their marriage might have a dream of their spouse leaving them. Or a person who is filled with worry/anxiety about a situation might dream about that situation. Or a person who is attracted to someone else might have a dream that they get married. These would be normal psychological phenomena, where our unconscious mind processes our desires, worries and fears in a dream.

Or sometimes you have dreams as a natural outflow of what you have been putting into you. For instance a person might watch a bunch of movies about cowboys and Indians and then have a dream about cowboys and Indians. Sometimes when we are asleep, our mind processes the things we have been putting into it during the day.

Dreams from our own heart/desires/mind can be very intense. One time I was on a 40 day fast. About 25 days into the fast, I dreamed that I ate something. I woke up thinking I had literally broken the fast and spent about 30 minutes repenting to God about that before He told me it was just a dream and I hadn't really broken the fast.

Here is another example of an intense dream from our own spirit. A friend of mine had a 14 year old son and she was struggling in the area of being an overprotective mother. Her son wanted to go to a slumber party. She dreamed that her 14 year old son drowned in her neighbor's pool. At first she was afraid that God was warning her not to let him go to the slumber party because he would drown in their pool if he went. The dream was so intense that she was sure it was from the Lord. But as she prayed and sought God, she came to understand that it was not a warning from God. It was just her own fears and overprotective tendency surfacing in this dream. Her son ended up going to the party and the spent the entire night playing video games. They never once went into the back yard or into the swimming pool.

DREAMS FROM THE ENEMY

And there is one more source for our dreams -- the devil. Dreams from the devil can be nightmares or they can be temptations or even subtle accusations or condemnations. They can be dreams of failing over and over again. They can be dreams to cause fear, to shake your confidence, to make you feel bad, dirty, unclean, or separated from God. Or they can be sexual or perverted in nature. In short, dreams from the devil either tear you down, or they try to entice you into sin. They try to move you away from God instead of drawing you closer to Him.

Dream Interpretation

WHAT IS THE SOURCE?

I have two pet peeves about dream interpretation. The first is when people try to treat a non-God dream as though it was a God-dream and interpret it as though God was speaking to them through it when He is not.

The first thing we need to do when we have a dream is to identify the source of the dream. If it is a God dream, then we want to find out what He is trying to speak to us. But if it is not a God dream, we need to handle it differently. We can still bring the dream to God and invite Him to help us process it. We might want to ask Him what response He would like us to have to the dream. For instance, if the dream is our own fears and uncertainties surfacing, we might want to invite Him into those areas of our lives and turn lordship of those areas over to Him. We might want to invite Him to work with us in these areas, to transform us and to strengthen us in Him, to build Godly strongholds in us.

If we are having nightmares because we watched a bunch of horror movies and we bring these to God, God might ask us to change what we watch on television. Sometimes God is very practical.

If the enemy is tormenting us in dreams, we still want to bring them to God. We want to make sure we are right with God, examine our hearts, etc. Then we may need to take authority over the enemy in the name of Jesus. We may also need to renounce sins, break soul ties, forgive those who have hurt us, etc., in order to help take away the enemy's stronghold to torment us in our lives. As we bring the enemy's dreams to God's light, God will show us how to respond in order to gain the victory over the enemy.

INTERPRETING SYMBOLS/OBJECTS IN A DREAM

My other pet peeve is when people try to assign generic meanings to various symbols and then apply them to a dream. They think that certain symbols always have certain meanings. I am sure you have heard people tell you that a car symbolizes your ministry, that the color black symbolizes sin and darkness and that a snake is symbolic of a demon. (Those are some of the most common universal applications of symbols.)

Actually, the last two examples I just cited are from Scripture and they tend to be valid most of the time. There are certain things that God uses over and over again in His word to have a given meaning. It is a reasonable assumption that God might use the same symbol from His word for the same meaning in a dream. But there are not very many symbols that God uses this way in His word. And I don't think He is likely to assign universal meanings to dream symbols when He hasn't been using that symbol that way in His word.

However, sometimes God assigns multiple meanings to a given symbol. When that happens, you have to be careful about how you apply it. Take the lion, for instance. Jesus is called the Lion Of The Tribe of Judah. But Satan is called a "roaring lion." So, if someone dreams of a lion, how do you know which interpretation to give it? (My contention is that you don't know unless God tells you. We need to be careful about assigning global interpretations to symbols in dreams, or we can end up with a false interpretation.)

Having said that, please be aware that sometimes God will use symbols in dreams that have a cultural relevance. In the USA, people tend to think of owls as symbolizing wisdom. However, American Indians (and several other cultures) see the owl as a symbol of impending disaster or death. If God wanted to speak to an American about wisdom, He might choose to use an owl because owls have that meaning to most Americans. But if God were speaking to an American Indian about wisdom, He probably would not choose to use an owl to represent it, because the owl has a different meaning to them. So it is fair to say that God could use generally understood symbols in a dream to communicate a specific meaning.

But most people tend to take the use of assigning a meaning to symbols to the extreme. They have whole books of what given symbols stand for. And the way people would interpret a dream is to look up the objects in the dream and tell you what each one means, according to this lookup book. I have serious problems with that approach, because it takes hearing from God out of the equation. With this approach, you don't need to hear from God, you simply need to look each symbol up in your handy-dandy reference book and -- poof -- you have your interpretation.

I believe that is not a valid way to interpret dreams. I believe that it is better to take the dream to God and to ask Him to speak to you about what He wanted to communicate in the dream. It is always more reasonable to ask God to clarify what He was communicating than to try to leave Him out of the process of interpreting a dream.