Dreams

This post has been a while in the making.

When people talk about prophetic dreams listeners’ hackles go up and people become wary, sceptical and defensive. Same! It isn’t that I don’t think God can’t speak through dreams. He can! Look at Joseph. I just find it difficult to know how that person can be so sure the dream is from God.

The thing is I frequently have extremely vivid dreams, and recent dreams (within the last few years) have made me begin to wonder if God is perhaps trying to tell me stuff. Several of the dreams could perhaps easily be described as “prophetic”, but are they from God or from somewhere else? I find it hard to believe they’re from God for this reason:

As a little atheist child, I had “prophetic dreams”. The one I remember most clearly was of a bridge collapsing under a passenger train (I had lots of bad dreams). I woke up, and too scared to sleep, I got up. My Dad, a stupidly early riser, was already up watching the early morning news. I sat to watch it with him, and there, on the tv, was a story about a train accident in Europe involving a bridge collapse.

My point is that when you sleep you are incredibly vulnerable. Sleep isn’t just a time when you’re still enough for God to speak, it’s also a time when the enemy can easily get in. I cannot say for certain that God didn’t give me the train accident dream, but I struggle to understand why God would reveal something like that to an imaginative, fearful child that would add to her fear. Further suspicions that make me think perhaps God wasn’t involved include:
-this led me to a fascination with dreams and other occultic bizarreness in my teenage years.
-my Mum (non-Christian) also had a similar experience involving a bus crash and she awoke crying. Could it be from a spirit that has attached itself to my family, or a generational curse, or the product of my great grandmother playing around with this sort of thing?

Given all this plus the fact that I frequently have strange dreams, nightmares and freaky sleeping experiences (maybe I’ll describe these another time), I found it difficult to trust that my “prophetic dreams” are from God. I was convinced this was not a safe way for God to speak to me, therefore He wouldn’t and He would stick to better paths of communication.

It is presumptuous and wrong to think God would be limited by this. And some of my dreams suggest that maybe God has been speaking to me in my sleep. Possible evidence:

a. I was home on holiday and I dreamt of my Dad dying. I woke up sobbing and felt the urge to pray for him. The following day he came over (he never came over- at the time Mum and he weren’t on good terms). His arms were covered in massive cuts. Apparently he had cut himself and was sitting on the bridge contemplating suicide when the police found him. This occurred in the early hours, about the time I had the dream.

b. I kept dreaming of houses falling apart, particularly while I was inside. Not long after a piece of ceiling fell on my colleague’s bed (thankfully he was on holiday), and Melbourne started experiencing earth tremors.

c. I previously posted of a dream starting with my experiments and ending with a tidal wave. Not long after, my experiments kept getting flooded out by heavy rain, and there were earth quakes and devastating tidal waves in the south Pacific islands.

d. For a while I kept dreaming that someone would break into our house. I attributed this to paranoia and fear. Last Friday someone broke in and stole some of our valuables. I was shaken, but not surprised, and now I wish I’d prayed more about it.

I’ve also had other dreams that evoke the same feelings of fear. Three notable examples include watching Melbourne be destroyed by electric storms, watching a massive storm come upon Sydney, and watching severe storms pass overhead that resulted in flooding and the death of three kids in regional NSW.

Are these prophetic? In fact, how can I be sure any of these are from God? It’s hard to say, because all of these dreams have filled me with incredible fear (with the exception of the one involving Dad- that was more overwhelming sadness). Such a fear shouldn’t come from God, right?

I don’t know. This is something I should seriously look into, and until I’m sure what is going on, I should perhaps approach my dreams without scepticism or fear, but with caution and prayer. It never hurts to pray.