Dreams are one of those things that “everybody” has.  Now, some of you reading this might say “I don’t dream”.  Scientifically speaking, everyone enters REM sleep and dreams, but many people don’t remember their dreams.  Regardless of whether one remembers or not, God speaks to all of us in our dreams.  They are usually about us and our lives, and can be warnings, instruction, informative or revelatory, reflection, and more, and not all dreams come from God.  Certain medications can influence our dreams, as can demonic powers and the prayers of other people, whether blessings curses.  Some people dream in color, while others dream in black and white.  Many times people have short dreams while others have long and detailed dreams with multiple parts or acts to them.  While types of dreams clearly vary, what we are going to look at today is the two basic steps to understanding our dreams.

Dreams accomplish many different things, as shared above, but a key comes out of Job 33:15-18.  It says:

“For God does speak—now one way, now another—though no one perceives it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn them from wrongdoing and keep them from pride, to preserve them from the pit, their lives from perishing by the sword.”

While the verse focuses on warnings, the key I want to focus on is that God speaks to us in dreams to guide us.  If we understand that God communicates with us regularly when we are asleep, we can glean Heaven’s wisdom for our lives here and now even when we aren’t spending time in prayer and listening to the Lord for instruction.  For example, I recently had a dream where a friend was telling me about a project he was working on.  In real life he isn’t currently, to the best of my knowledge, actually working on the aspect of this project we discussed in my dream, but it touches on some things he is already doing, and this dream seems to provide him with insight on a direction God wants to take the project in the future.  While most dreams are about the dreamer, this dream was about him, not me, (evident by the content of the conversation) and provided divine guidance for the future.

Dreams offer prophetic guidance for us in our daily lives, but we can’t take advantage of that guidance if we don’t do two things:  write them down and interpret them.  The reason we have to write them down is that for whatever reason, dreams can be easy to forget.  Sometimes I will wake up in the morning with a dream that was so vivid I am convinced I will remember it later. . . only to forget the entire dream.  The worst part is that I know that if I had written the dream down then (or recorded myself speaking the details), I would have it, but because I waited, it is lost.  I had this happen last week.  I had two dreams, and both of them seemed significant to me.  I was sure that I would remember them, so didn’t write them down.  I promptly forgot the one, and then because I’m so awesome, I even waited a week to write down the second dream, losing a number of details on that one as well.

I’ll be honest, it’s actually quite difficult to interpret dreams I have completely forgotten, so my best advice is to make sure to record your dreams in some way very soon after you wake up.  Some people use their phone to record, some people keep a journal right at their bedside.  I usually use the notepad function on my phone to write down the date and a summary and any relevant notes about the dream and flesh out the details later.  It works fairly well for me.  Then, I eventually put them all into a single Word document by date.  If I ever want to look up keywords, I can just use the find function and search for any keywords from as far back as the journal goes.

Interpreting dreams is the second step to getting useful information from them.  What is so difficult is that they are frequently hard to interpret.  My dreams are often long and detailed,  and while individual items in a dream usually hold meaning, it is possible to get what a friend calls “analysis paralysis”, where I get tied up in the details such that it becomes hard to see the bigger picture.  I usually have to write down the dream, then write down a much shorter summary of the dream, cutting out as many minor details as possible.  Once I get a general overview of the dream, I can often figure out what it is about.  Once I understand the overall subject of the dream, then I can flesh out the details once more.  This doesn’t always work for me, but it is one of the two things I do to interpret my dreams.  The other thing I do is ask Holy Spirit.

The Bible says in Ephesians 2 that He is the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation.  Isaiah 11 says He is the Spirit of Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, and Knowledge.   The Holy Spirit knows everything we need to help interpret our dreams, so asking Him for help is a good idea.  Sometimes He will give me one or two piece of the puzzle that helps me put things together and figure it out.  On rare occasion, He will explain the whole dream to me.  Other times I don’t really get any understanding at all, so if I don’t feel that those dreams are poignant or significant, I just don’t worry about it.  On occasion, I will ask a friend for help, as sometimes it is easier to interpret other people’s dreams than our own, but I try to keep that to a minimum as we all have dreams and it’s not someone else’s job to interpret mine.

Dreams as a whole are rarely as clear and obvious as the one I had about my friend and his project.  They usually have a lot of imagery and symbolism that clouds our understanding, so we have to bust out our best codebreaker abilities and figure it out.  Sometimes God will use a play on words to show us something.  Once I dreamed about raising the dead on a train.  In praying about the meaning, the Holy Spirit showed me that the train represented training—providing a vehicle to learn something.  That might not have been apparent at first, but that one hint from Holy Spirit put the whole dream into perspective, and that was all it took for me to work out the rest of the details.  In fact, a few months later I had some follow-up dreams to this one that provided further guidance on how to go about that training process.

In the end, learning to interpret dreams can be very helpful, and it is a good way to get revelation from God on an ongoing basis.  Some people take a dream interpretation class or training of some kind, and this can be helpful.  Well-done Christian dream interpretation training will help provide an overall framework for learning to interpret dreams, but even those classes have limits.  Dream interpretation books, in my mind, are the same.  They can possibly provide a little help if you are stuck on a particular dream symbol, but you usually need to understand more of the dream before a symbol dictionary can help.  In the end, nothing is a substitute for one-on-one communication with Holy Spirit.  When we talk to God about our dreams, He will help us.

If you don’t think you dream and want to start remembering them, already dream and want to dream more and remember them better, or dream and remember but want to get better about interpreting them, then pray the following prayer and then start putting your faith into action.  Record your dreams and practice praying over them and interpreting them.  As you are faithful with what you are given, God will give you more!

Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, I ask that you would speak to me during my sleep.  I ask that you would increase my dreams and help me remember them.  I ask that you would give me wisdom like you did Solomon, and understanding like you did Daniel.  I ask this all in Jesus’ name.  Amen.