What Do Your Dreams Mean?

by Paul Meier

We all have strange dreams from time to time, and they are still worth looking at and praying about to see if there is something God wants us to learn from them-like buried anger, fear of rejection, or other such things.

 

Dreams are mentioned 150 times in scripture, and God often spoke to his children in dreams. Here are just a few examples: Joseph, son of Jacob (Genesis 37:5–10); Joseph, the husband of Mary (Matthew 2:12–22); Solomon (1 Kings 3:5–15); and several others (Daniel 2:17:1Matthew 27:19). There is also a prophecy of the prophet Joel (Joel 2:28), quoted by the apostle Peter in Acts 2:17, that mentions God using dreams. So God can speak through dreams, if He chooses to.

 

Recurrent dreams are more significant than a one-time dream, however. You say you have recurring, oppressive dreams, so I would encourage you to pray for insight from the Lord whether they represent some unresolved issue within you.

 

Have you been oppressed by someone?

 

Have you dealt with all the related anger, grief and disappointment?

 

Have you forgiven the oppressor and turned vengeance over to God, who promises in Romans 12 to repay those who are unrepentant?

 

There is a good chance God is using those dreams to show you something He wants you to heal from. Mark Twain said that it is not what you eat that gives you indigestion, but what is eating you. The same usually applies to your dreams.

 

Sometimes you get bad dreams from what you eat or from a medication reaction, but usually they are like movies that you write, direct, and act in all at once—movies about whatever is eating you that night.

 

When I treat clients, I ask them every single day whether they had any dreams the night before. I use their dreams to guess what is eating away at them in their unconscious and to discover root problems.

 

For example, if there is violence in the dreams, there is almost certainly buried anger or fear of being victimized that needs to be dealt with.

 

If they have tornado dreams, which are common, that shows how stressed out they are about the emotional “tornado” they are going through right now.

 

If they dream they are flying, it usually means they are making good progress and feel they are succeeding at resolving their conflicts.

 

If a married person dreams he or she is in a car and the mate is driving, but my client is in the back seat or in the trunk, it usually means my client feels overly controlled and disrespected by the mate.

 

Sometimes we are more than one person in a dream, like a dream one of my patients told me recently in which she was her current age but taking care of an eight year old girl she could not recognize, comforting the little girl. This client had been abused all of her childhood, and was now deciding to love herself anyway and nurture herself instead of hating herself like most abused kids and adults do. She was herself now, nurturing her wounded self as a child.

 

We have to be careful not to assume we know what a dream means, because only God knows for sure.

 

The Bible says that God speaks to us in the night seasons, and that even when we wake up in the morning, he will have taught us things the night before.

 

Although God used dreams greatly to reveal His plans in Scripture, we must remember that His ultimate revelation came in Christ.

 

“Long ago God spoke in many different ways to our fathers through the prophets, in visions, dreams, and even face to face, telling them little by little about his plans.

But now in these days he has spoken to us through his Son to whom he has given everything and through whom he made the world and everything there is.”

Hebrews 1:1-2 NLB

See also: Can Dreams Be From Demons? 

 

 

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