For articles of other columnists
click here
>>
For other articles of Mark Gardner
click here >>
Once when God woke me from sleep with a dream, I asked God why he wakes me in the middle of the night. “Because I can’t get your attention during the day,” was his reply. That has certainly been true for much of my life, which is one reason why God has provided me with lots of great dreams. They have revealed hidden things from my past, showed me what I need to do in the present to heal my heart and grow, and where God will be taking me spiritually in the future.
Most of our dreams are
“maintenance” dreams, so-called because our brain uses them to clean up
emotions from our waking hours, help us retain in memory life events, and
more that neuroscience and psychology haven’t figured out yet. We
usually don’t remember these. But when God uses our dreamscapes to speak
to us, we remember those. Unless of course, we aren’t interested in God
giving us dreams, in which case he won’t waste his time. Everyone I know
that has ever asked God for a dream has gotten one.
Understanding our dreams is the hard part for most of us. There are lots of books available that can help us interpret dream symbols and stories, and here’s my perspective on them. At the foundation of dream interpretation is that God chooses images from our own mind and heart, because they speak to us in a language that arises out of the depth of ourselves. The things we see in the dream are archetypes, or basic symbols, that mean something to us and are about us.
So, people in our dreams are about their meaning to us more than whom they are. Whether I dream about a living or deceased family member, God is trying to tell me something about what I learned from that person. Does that person represent love or abuse to me? Did they teach me self-worth or self-deprecation? Did they lead me to God or prevent me from knowing him? In one dream, my parents drove me to a counselor to get me some help, but wouldn’t come in themselves. God used this to remind me that my parents did not want personal insight or growth, but remained for most of their lives in the immature state in which they had always existed. Instead, they identified me as the source of problems in our relationships—that I was the one who needed help. This insight helped me to let go of self-blame for the poor quality of our relationships.
Strangers and aliens of one kind or another are about unfamiliar parts of ourselves God is trying to acquaint us with. Shadowy figures are about hidden beliefs. And the way that people interact with us can help us interpret the meaning, as I illustrated with the dream about my parents. I once dreamt of a UFO looking for me. It had a searchlight on it so bright, it hurt my eyes when it flashed my way. I had lots of fear, even as I awoke from the dream. The aliens searching for me was a message that there was some belief or memory I was trying to hide from and was fearful of learning. In another dream, I was serving as a soldier in an Asian country (a foreign culture), something that never happened in real life. God used the dream experience to help me see I was fighting against learning new insights about myself.
Similarly, animals often represent the spiritual or life energy inside us, and thinking about what the animals are doing usually points to something important about our spiritual energy. One dream had a friend and me calling some horses. They appeared briefly at the top of a ridge, but wouldn’t come, which I realized meant that I wasn’t connected with my own life energy, the true, spiritual energy that God gives us when he creates us. After working on this issue with a counselor for a while, I had a new dream in which I called the horses and this time they came. I was told in the dream one was my own, and that her name was Anima, which is Greek for our inner life energy. I got on her and we rode off on an unknown path. God showed me I was successful in embracing an important part of whom he’d made me to be, and was using it in everyday life.
Buildings and structures often represent the framework of our inner thought or spiritual lives. For instance, being in the home we grew up in is about what we learned in our family of origin. Schools refer to our learning process, perhaps what God wants us to be learning. Public buildings may be about our public lives. Basements may reflect what is in our deep heart, and hidden to us.
The time frame and setting for the dream often indicate the time of our life and topic God is addressing. Dreams about childhood memories are about the past; dreams about present day activities, the present; and ones that we don’t recognize as to persons or place are often about what we need to be doing to grow into our future, or are about where God is taking us.
God’s messages speak almost exclusively about us and not others, even though in our dreams we frequently encounter people familiar to us from our waking lives. The Holy Spirit tells us our own story, and almost never someone else’s. This means that if someone dreams of a loved one in an accident, it is not a prophecy of the future, but a symbol of what the accident of a loved one means to the person, and what that has to say about the person’s life. In one of the greatest dreams I’ve been given, a tornado (an “act of God”) came and destroyed the home I grew up in with my parents inside, as I stood in horror watching from across the street. God was telling me that I needed to remove from my inner life the basic paradigms of believing and thinking that I had learned from my parents while growing up. It didn’t have anything to do with what I was supposed to do in my relationship with my parents (certainly not kill them!!). This was the same dream in which the horses wouldn’t come when called. After I did the work with a counselor to remove and renew much of the old thinking (Rom. 12:2), I had the dream of meeting my horse and leaving on her.
When we see our dreams as God speaking to us, they become meaningful, as well as fascinating, and fun. We may want to share dreams with family and friends as another way of telling our story, or of asking them to help us interpret them. The best way I’ve found of understanding my own dreams is to ask God for the interpretation, and meditating on their meaning. I record all of them in my journal where I keep all my most important learnings and conversations with God. I still return to some I haven’t yet understood in hopes the time is right for God to reveal something new that I need. I encourage you to ask God for dreams and write them down so you can ponder them. May all your dreams be great ones.
Mark Gardner is a Christian Life Coach in Eaton, Ohio who specializes in helping people experience The Extraordinary Life God promises us. His web site is gardnercoaching.com.