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A Dream Interpretation Journey

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1. Art Katz and the Attic

Principles for Interpreting Symbols

In 1991, I read Exploring the World of Dreams by Benny Thomas.^[1] I highly recommend this book (which has recently been renamed Exploring and Interpreting Dreams) to anyone who wants to interpret dreams. …I really mean that. I don’t want you to stop reading my book, but if you feel you need to choose between my short book and Benny Thomas’s longer book, read Benny Thomas’s.

Following the instructions in Exploring the World of Dreams, I started writing down my dreams, and this was the fourth dream I recorded (shortened to make it simpler):

I was sitting in my room in college, and I saw Art Katz walk by and go up the stairs (Art was a preacher I knew of in real life). I decided I wanted to spend some time getting to know him. In the dream, I thought about an earlier time I had seen Art. I had begged him to disciple me and let me get to know him, but he refused because he could see I was unstable. He also knew that he was not the person I thought he was.

Now I hoped I could get to know him, but first I needed to go to class. As I headed there, I realized I needed my bike, so I decided to go to the basement of my dorm to get it, but I ended up in the attic. When I got there, I noticed I had nothing on my feet.

Earlier, the attic had been full of junk; I had been unable to make my way through it. Now it was fairly empty. I studied its structure. It was broken into sections with wide doorways between them. I could see the slope of the roof.

I tried to make my way through the attic, but the supports became too low at the far end. I got down on my stomach, but it still seemed I would get stuck. Then a guy I knew in real life came in and told me I wasn’t supposed to be in the attic. The church denominations stored their stuff there, and they were afraid that their stuff would be stolen.

What could this dream possibly mean? Here are some general principles for interpreting symbols:

1. There are standard symbols. You already know many of these. Some of them are in the word of God, like light being a symbol for something good and darkness being a symbol for something bad. Other standard symbols come from figures of speech. One time I had a dream where my family was in the woods. The interpretation was that “we weren’t out of the woods yet.”

   Other standard symbols can come from the experience of people who have interpreted dreams. They have noticed repeating patterns that seem to hold true for many people’s dreams. A person’s car is often symbolic for their life or ministry. Their house may be another symbol for their life. A college may be symbolic for learning (which I believe is the case in the dream above). The above dream also mentions a basement. Basements can be symbolic for something foundational. An attic may be symbolic for a person’s mind. (It is at the top of a building just as your brain is at the top of your body. Also, an attic, like your mind, is where you store your memories.)

2. <page 7>The second way to interpret symbols is to ask, “What does this mean to me?” I had a pretty good idea what Art Katz meant to me. He was symbolic for the prophetic side of Christianity. (Being prophetic means a person focusses on the Holy Spirit speaking directly to a person’s heart rather than on intellectual understanding.) Art was a man who started ministering in the 1960s and continued for several decades. He had a fiery, non-compromising message that called the church back to the power and reality of the Holy Spirit. He was the speaker on the night when I was introduced to the Charismatic movement.^[2] For many years after that, I had followed his ministry. His words often stirred me to seriously seek God and try to hear from Him prophetically.

3. Finally, the third way to interpret symbols is to ask what is going on in your life that the dream might be a picture of. Here is where this dream became obvious to me. It showed me wanting to spend time with Art Katz. When I dreamed it, I was going through a time where I was trying to get back in touch with the prophetic. I had just been through five years where I had backed away from it, and I was now seeking to reconnect.

A History of My Journey

We are closing in on the interpretation of the dream, but before I continue, I need to mention a few more principles that I have picked up from experience:

1. Your life is a journey; a dream may be a snapshot of some piece of that journey.

2. The snapshot usually contains a message for a period of time in your immediate future.

3. Some dreams may contain insights about many years into the past and/or future, but they still usually also contain a message for the immediate future.

4. The snapshot usually refers to lessons you are learning rather than to specific events.

5. Your dreams help you interpret your journey, and your journey helps you interpret your dreams.

Let’s apply these principles. The dream mentions Art turning me away because I was unstable. Did that tie in with my journey? Absolutely. Please bear with me while I describe some of my weaknesses. If you know about them, it will help make sense of several of the dreams in this book.

My instability first showed up when I was ten years old. I had a disagreement with my parents that was fairly common for children at that time. Most children handled it without much trouble, but I was different. I decided I couldn’t trust my parents, which left me feeling alone and unprotected. Then I decided that the best way to protect myself was to be perfect, and I drove myself to achieve this.

Of course I failed, and my frustrations with my weaknesses led to such fits of rage that I began to physically punish myself for my failures. I punched trees to inflict pain on my hands. I jumped in the air and landed on my knees to inflict pain on them. After a while, I cut my hands with razor blades. Amazingly, I had never heard of “cutting,” which is a fairly common disorder today. For me, cutting was something I came up with entirely on my own.

<page 8>Obviously, I was dealing with some sort of psychological problem, but I had no idea what it was. I didn’t find a name for it until I was in my fifties. Then a friend learned my story and asked, “Were you ever diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder?”

I don’t know that I had ever heard of Borderline Personality Disorder, but I decided to take a look at it. As I did, I realized that though I had never shown enough symptoms to receive that diagnosis, I was certainly headed in its direction at times in my life. One of those times was when I was ten years old; cutting is a classic symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder.^[3]

Many psychologists believe that there is a genetic weakness that contributes to this condition,^[4] and I believe I have that weakness. It makes a person’s emotions extremely difficult to handle, and that has been my experience throughout my life. (This weakness is called a tendency toward emotional dysregulation.) One way to think about this is that I have race car engine emotions with go-cart brakes.^[5] My feelings can carry me so strongly that I need a great deal of wisdom to handle them.

My series of overreactions when I was ten years old were an example. I had a fairly small reason to not trust my parents, but my emotions caused me to give up on them. Then I swung to the extreme of demanding perfection from myself, and I reacted to failures with self-punishment. All of this occurred in spite of the fact that I had a fairly happy home life. I had never been seriously mistreated, and my parents weren’t angry people. My treatment of myself was far worse than anything anyone else had done to me.

Another way to think about emotional dysregulation is that it makes a person’s emotions like an out of balance bicycle wheel. Each spoke on the wheel is an emotion like fear, anger, love …. In most people, these emotions find a middle ground, represented by the hub of the wheel, where the emotions work together well. When the person gets fearful or angry, for example, their general love and trust of others can give them perspective. The hub of the wheel stays close to the middle.

For a person with a tendency toward Borderline Personality Disorder, one emotion or another will grab control for a time and exclude the others. It is as if the hub of the wheel gets pulled out to the rim, and the wheel spins painfully. The person can be giddy at one moment and filled with rage shortly afterward. They may be blissfully secure for a time, only to quickly fall to irrational fear.

I have these tendencies, but I never ended up in full-blown Borderline Personality Disorder. Were there reasons for that? I believe there were. First, my family life was fairly healthy; full Borderline Personality Disorder tends to be associated with childhood trauma.^[6] A healthy family life might not have been enough for me, however. A more important part of what kept me from Borderline Personality Disorder was that Jesus saved me when I was fourteen years old. His love and truth held me steady and kept my emotional turmoil from pulling me out of control.

Begging to be Discipled by Art

<page 9>Jesus did not, however, take away my tendency toward instability, and it reasserted itself when I first experienced prophetic ministry from people like Art Katz. The thrills that came with the supernatural experiences this ministry brought were intoxicating. One of the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder is a tendency toward addictions,^[7] and the power of God was like a drug for me. I wanted more and more of it.

When the dream referred to me begging Art to disciple me, I believe it was referring to the zeal with which I pursued the prophetic voice of God. I joined the Charismatic movement and devoted myself to experiencing the Holy Spirit in whatever way I could. I rearranged my whole life to seek His work.

Then, shortly before I turned seventeen, I felt as if a cloud of demons descended on me and pulled me into a bondage that took me years to escape. My life took on some of the characteristics of a horror movie. Invisible beings seemed to be hounding me with little purpose other than to derail and torment me.

How could something like this have happened? I was so committed to the Lord! Think of that out of balance bicycle wheel. My emotions had carried me to extremes – and a set of demons (either figurative or literal) had moved in to take advantage.

The Art Katz in the attic dream gave a picture of this. It told me that I had begged Art to disciple me, but he had refused because I was too unstable. I had sought to walk in the prophetic, but I didn’t know how to handle it.

Yet I cried out to God, and He taught me how to gradually drive the demons back. Doing so involved using my mind and will to identify truth and to stand on it, and by the time I got out of college, I could live a healthy life in the Lord. It was an amazing transformation, and I became even more sold out to Jesus.

A number of years later, however, I found myself, once again, focusing on hearing the prophetic voice of God. Our church was having prophetic conferences, and I was excited. I fasted, prayed, studied the word, taught in church, prophesied, and was on fire for God. Then a change in my job situation sent my heart into rage that knocked me out of my prophetic bliss. I struggled to keep myself from doing something stupid and hurtful.

I tried one approach after another to move past my rage, but it took a full year before I began to feel normal again. My Borderline Personality Disorder tendencies had once again pulled my bicycle wheel out of balance …and a great deal of work had been required to bring it back into alignment. Once again, the trouble had come as I tried to move in the prophetic.

For a second time, I had begged Art Katz to disciple me, and I had been turned away because I was too unstable.

The Attic

At the time when this job trouble started, my father died. He was an intellectual who had a personal library of perhaps one thousand books. I began to read several of them to see if the intellectual world had some of the answers I had failed to find in the prophetic world.

The books could have led me away from the Lord (they weren’t Christian books), but God was with me. I found that I could read even anti-Christian messages, and discernment would rise in my heart to dissect them, separate the good from the bad, and pull out useful information.

<page 10>I gained insights into how life worked, and my rage slowly transformed into healthy motivation. I learned how to thrive in the business world, and my career was saved. It took about five years to reach the point where I was once again eager for the prophetic, but I eventually got there. That was in 1991, when a number of friends in church were reading Exploring the World of Dreams by Benny Thomas. I read it also, and I wrote down the Art Katz dream.

It was easy to see how the dream fit into my journey. It showed me in a place of learning (college), once again wanting to get together with Art (symbolic for the prophetic), which was exactly where I was in my life.

Yet the dream then showed me doing something that didn’t make sense. Rather than spending time with Art, I ended up in an attic. Then a person told me that I shouldn’t be there. What did that mean?

I looked at my life and did my best to interpret it. I thought, “That attic seems to be symbolic for my mind. It represents the sort of studying I have done for the past five years. I think I need to choose between continuing in this intellectual direction and turning back to the prophetic. The dream seems to be a warning that if I go into the attic, I will miss Art.”

 

That wasn’t all that bad of an interpretation. I was basically right about Art Katz and the attic. What I missed, however, was the extent of my problem with instability. At the time of the dream, I thought it was basically behind me. I didn’t realize that I would face an on-again, off-again battle against it that would last for decades, if not for the rest of my life.

As a result, I missed the true message of the dream. I wasn’t supposed to avoid the attic; I was supposed to go into it. The attic was a classroom that would give me the stability I needed to spend serious time with Art. In fact, he was going to join me in the attic.

“What?” you say. “How did you get that out of the dream?” In the next three chapters I will describe why I marched up into the attic, how it changed my life, and how this eventually led to a great release of the prophetic in my life.

 

 

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