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A Dream Interpretation Journey
I was hesitant to include the Iranian army tank dream in this book. It took me almost two months to decide to add it. The dream was too personal, and I didn’t want another “fight for my sanity” dream after I had shared others in earlier chapters. Would people think I spent my entire life trying to not be crazy?
Nevertheless, I had decided to honestly describe what I was learning while writing this book, and the Iranian army tank dream was certainly a key part of that. It seemed good to take the risk of recording my experience as I discovered what God was doing.
Once the dream helped me to identify what I needed to address, I turned to face the darkness. I embraced the guilt, fear, and anger and asked God what I should do with them. I had a pretty good grasp on what my tendency toward emotional dysregulation was like by this point. I had a lifetime of experience together with a good deal of reading to draw on, so I was on familiar terrain. I knew that if I didn’t accept my offended emotions as important parts of me, they would misfire beneath the surface and sabotage my life. I had to bring them to the surface and consciously work through them with God-given army-tank-like faith, perseverance, and wisdom.
On the other hand, I also knew that there was the danger that I might not yet have the skill I needed to handle them well. They were going to make me a little crazy for a while, and that could lead to mistakes. However, based on what God seemed to be doing, I suspected that He was giving me the grace to avoid the worst of that. I decided to accept the risk and see what happened.
I opened myself to my emotions and discovered several messages they were telling me. First, a good deal of my guilt came from the fact that after God had done so much in my life, I was allowing others to keep me from fully sharing it. My conscience needed to come to grips with whether this was acceptable.
Second, I felt a growing panic over the fact that I was now in my sixties, and I could die at any moment without delivering messages I believed God had given me. Was I going to miss my calling?
Third, I was angry because I had been placed in a position where it had become so difficult to do something as basic as share my testimony. That just seemed wrong. It was so far from what I expected that my heart refused to comprehend it.
I allowed these feelings to rise, and I experienced several nights in which I missed some sleep. I lay in bed trying to find answers to the storm brewing within me. It was a painful experience, but I seemed to be making my way through it. Issues became clearer, and I took small steps to handle them.
Then God allowed circumstances that caused the storm to surge. A situation arose that made me feel as if I was once again not being allowed to be honest, and it brought to the surface a set of old wounds that led to the fear that I would always have to hide from people.
Confusion and hurt came in waves. I was tempted to conclude that trying to open up was a hopeless pursuit; I might as well just retreat to a world of books and study. It wasn’t worth the effort to hold onto faith for anything more than that. I would always end up feeling that relationships would never work for me. Either I was unfit to be honest or others were unable to accept my honesty. It didn’t matter who was right or wrong; there was nothing I could do about it.
I felt a strong temptation to embrace a broken spirit and give up. I, of course, noticed how ironic it was that a broken spirit suddenly looked attractive to me, but the thought of dealing with the pain I felt – possibly for a lifetime – looked unbearable. Maybe there were no answers for someone like me. Giving up felt like it might be the only way to find some relief.
Fortunately, I had recently dreamed a shocking dream that helped me see the way forward. It let me know that turning from relationships would be a serious mistake. I had to trust God to meet me right where I was and bring me through. He had done that many times in the past. Though I had not seen Him do it in the area currently causing pain, I suspected that everything now happening was a part of His plan to get to the heart of the problem.
Still, at my lowest point I fell asleep one night feeling as if the army tank was flattening me into the ground.
God’s grace became clear as I persevered. Slowly, I came to grips with the fact that the rules of my personal world changed when I involved others in it. Their presence altered what I could and couldn’t accomplish, both positively and negatively. God might use them to open doors, but He could also use them to close doors. When I deferred or cancelled my plans for their sakes (like deciding not to speak), I wasn’t giving up on His plans; I was placing my life into His hands, trusting that He would work.
I gained perspective by considering my career. My successes hadn’t been based on my actions alone. It was only as God brought the right people at the right time, and as I chose to fit in with them, that my work contributed to something bigger. Without their help, my efforts would not have amounted to much. With their help, my work became a far greater blessing than it could have been if I were on my own.
I slowly became convinced that ministry worked in much the same way. I could accomplish a certain amount on my own by God’s grace, but something bigger could only be done as I fit in with others. This was difficult to accept, because it is tough for me to fit in. I seem to need to go off on my own to find answers to questions that others don’t even ask. Yet in spite of this, God had made a way for me on my job, and I trusted He would do the same in ministry.
His work would involve somehow bringing the speaker and the army tank from my dream together. It was a mystery to me how this could happen. I had tried to do it so many times and had failed. Something was blocking it, and I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Still, there was reason for hope. When the hard driving emotions in the tank part of me had influenced my childhood, they had left me so frustrated that I cut myself with razor blades. Yet God had not only brought me out of that, He had also transformed those emotions into valuable motivations for good in my life. If He had already done so much, why not trust Him to finish His work (Ephesians 3:20, Philippians 1:6)?
As the trial continued, I embraced the frightening task of rethinking my relationships. I reluctantly accepted the fact that I am not a typical person whose story is easy to hear. By this point in my life, I had spent close to five years studying Borderline Personality Disorder, and I had slowly digested the idea that my experience of emotions might be so different from what others experienced that they might not be able to relate to me. I now expanded that idea to explore the distressing possibility that this could mean that my opportunities to share my story would be limited. Though some of my most amazing experiences have come as I have transparently opened up before God, transparency with others might not always be helpful.
I had eagerly looked forward to the day when I could openly speak about what God had done in my life. It was disheartening to think that His work might be so uniquely for me that I would rarely be able to share it. Still, I did my best to open my heart to this possibility. Denying my desires is a normal part of the Christian life (Luke 9:23-24). If God needed to rework my entire framework of how I viewed honesty, what else made sense but to cooperate with Him?
These sorts of insights put my guilt, fear, and anger into perspective. The cars in a herd dream had shown me moving in lockstep with others and experimenting until I found a way to be different. That was a picture of what God had done in my past, and it was an important stage in my life. By breaking away from others, I was able to find Jesus in the unique ways He wanted to reveal Himself to me. Yet a side effect of this had been a partial separation from them, and I was now facing the complicated difficulties associated with that separation. People might never share the same sorts of experiences that I have had, and I might never be able to bridge some of the gaps between us. And even when I could bridge those gaps, they wouldn’t be bridged in a single day. I needed to give everyone, including myself, a good deal of patience as God unveiled His way forward.
I was making progress, but as I started to live out these sorts of insights, I found myself falling into depression. In one situation in particular, I was in a church meeting, and I was so uncomfortable that I wanted to run out of the building. It was as if trying to work with people had stripped me of the weapons I needed to do spiritual warfare. I was questioning my army-tank-like tendencies, and without them I felt I lacked the ability to protect my heart.
I sought the Lord, and I believe He gave me a balancing message. It was that holding back for the sake of others didn’t mean I should try to be like them. I should continue to be army-tank-like in my personal life. It was how He had taught me to deal with the challenges I faced. The fact that I might choose not to share my strategy openly didn’t mean I should let go of it for myself.
Added to this was another insight. It was that when I was in a situation where I believed God did want me to speak, I should tell my story rather than trying to tell someone else’s. Just as David couldn’t fight Goliath in Saul’s armor (1 Samuel 17:38-40), I couldn’t accomplish much by pretending I was someone I was not. I had to use the weapons God had placed into my hands.
I was discovering something I had never seen before. It was that when I tried to fit in with others, I tended to let go of what worked for me. In an attempt to become emotionally close, I tried to adopt their approach to life, yet doing so took away my ability to handle my tendency toward emotional dysregulation.
One symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder is that those with it tend to be like chameleons who try to become whatever the people around them want them to be.[20] I hadn’t realized that I had this weakness until I saw how the simplicity that others modeled affected me. When I let down my guard toward them, my instinct was to also subconsciously embrace their simple approach to life. Yet simplicity felt toxic to me; it surfaced a fear that I would be returned to the instability I had fought so hard to escape. So after letting my guard down, I would panic and throw it back up.
When I wrote that simplicity felt toxic to me (the previous paragraph), it was near the beginning of 2020. I had been working through the emotions brought out by the Iranian army tank dream for about five months. When I recognized the fear of instability rising in my heart, the pieces of what God had been doing came together. The knot unraveled, and to my amazement, I concluded that the fact that I had been writing this book while interpreting the dreams of the past three chapters had not been a coincidence. God had led me to write the book, in part, because it helped me to understand what He was saying to me through the dreams!
This book explores the history of my relationship with the prophetic, and I have found that prophetic people often say something like, “Don’t get all caught up in complicated theories or studies. Just listen to God and He will show you what you need to know.” It was this simple message, through no malice on the part those who spoke it, that tended to lead me into the emotional instability mentioned in the Art Katz and the attic dream. When I tried to “just listen to God,” I ended up in terrifying emotional near-meltdowns that made me feel as if I might end up in a psych ward.
This is a side effect of having a tendency toward Borderline Personality Disorder. Those with it can become so confused by the messages from those around them that they end up cutting themselves with sharp objects. Life doesn’t make sense to them unless they work extremely hard to handle their emotions. Without great amounts of wisdom, their personalities tend to spin out of control.
When I lacked that wisdom, a deep-seated fear had been created in me that I was a freak lost in a world that had no answers for my demons and monsters. This fear was so ingrained in me that even after God had freed me from the worst of my problems, its panic-like foundation remained. It was usually hidden from view, but it reemerged at certain times.
For example, when people said something like, “I am just a simple person who needs a simple message,” it was as if they were saying that the approach I believed God had given me was a deception. If I was really spiritual, I could be like they were. Along with this was the fear that I would always feel separated from others. Because I couldn’t seem to live like they did, I would never really feel like a part of the body of Christ.
I hadn’t realized the ways in which these feelings secretly haunted me. I once heard a man who had fought his way out of poverty describe his life as being like a rat that had climbed out of a gutter, who then spent the rest of its life living in fear that it would fall back into it. He felt as if poverty was always lurking beneath the surface, waiting for him to make a mistake so that it could drag him back down. …I felt like that man, not with regard to poverty, but with regard to instability.
I had read about these sorts of lurking feelings when I studied Borderline Personality Disorder. A person can actually develop posttraumatic stress disorder-like symptoms concerning times of past emotional difficulty.[21] Painful feelings from periods in which they didn’t know how to handle their emotions can return with a vengeance as new experiences remind them of the old. Seemingly innocent situations pull them back into a frightening mindset as if they were reliving the trauma of past instability. It becomes extremely difficult to think calmly and rationally.
I had never connected this to what I was experiencing in relationships. It was only after I had written that simplicity felt toxic to me that I saw what was happening. When people expressed a view of life that I held at times when I had fallen into instability, my heart reacted to their words by falling back into the fearful emotions associated with those times. It wasn’t anywhere near as strong as full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder, but it was severe enough to confuse me.
Fortunately, I had chosen to remain in relationships in spite of that fear. I believed that this was the loving thing to do, and I also hoped that it would help me to come to grips with what was happening inside of me. But before God opened my eyes, I hadn’t been able to make sense of it. Did my discomfort mean I was being insensitive toward others? Were they being insensitive toward me? I couldn’t discern what was happening.
God was now putting His finger on the problem. I was dealing with a reaction to relationships that was derailing me with fears from my past.
I concluded, to my amazement, that God had led me to write a book on interpreting dreams, in part, because the dreams I unsuspectedly chose as examples laid out before my eyes the history of this problem. The Art Katz in the attic dream showed how it had destabilized me when I was young. Writing about it had brought to my mind that God had started speaking to me about it in the first dreams I wrote down back in 1991. The Bill Gothard Mountains and Indiana Jones and the razor wire cage dreams showed how He had given me the tools to deal with it over the years. He had spent decades building into me the wisdom I needed to maintain my sanity. He had become my amazing therapist, my Wonderful Counselor (Isaiah 9:6).
Then these past three chapters recorded how He brought a significant part of the remaining emotional infection to a head, lanced it, and gave me the additional tools I needed to deal with it. I suddenly realized that my fear didn’t make sense any more. With the wealth of earlier insights He had given me together with the adjustments described in the past three chapters, I had the tools I needed to work through my feelings. They no longer had to frustrate my relationships.
I didn’t expect this to happen as a result of writing this book. I only decided to write it because I had been asked to speak about dream interpretation at a church conference. And when I chose which dreams to include, I picked ones that played key roles in me learning how to interpret dreams. My goal wasn’t to write about my personal issues.
Only now do I see the incredible way in which God has been weaving everything together. He has done far more than I imagined. He has given me a book that lays out the history of the loose connection in the fiber optics in the garage dream. At the heart of that loose connection was a subconscious fear triggered by relationships.
This problem contributed to the cluelessness shown in the soccer dream. When the suppressed turmoil in my heart surfaced, it kept me from being able to discern when it was time to speak and when it was time to remain quiet. It also made the stakes of speaking so high that disagreements undermined my ability to think clearly. I had difficulty making relationship decisions and learning from them. I couldn’t find the wisdom to bring the competing parts of my personality together. Even a fairly tame response from someone like “perhaps it has been too easy for you,” sent me into confusion.
As God has brought this problem into the light, it has been losing its hold on me. Wisdom has been growing in my heart. Healing is spreading. The misled army tank is being tamed. The guilt, fear, and anger are receding like the waves of a fading tide, gradually returning to the sea. The process of fragmentation is reversing. The part of me that wants to love people (the speaker) is combining with the part that wants to share truth with clarity (the tank).
God has pulled a number of insights together like words in a sentence – and to my surprise, He has ended the sentence with an exclamation point! I believe that this is what the fiber optics in the garage dream had told me could happen. It showed a loose fiber optics connection in my garage (symbolic for not being able to connect with others). I tried to fix it but couldn’t. (Now I know why.) Yet there was a fiber optics expert in the garage. He was symbolic for the Holy Spirit, Who has been recabling my heart to better connect with others.
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