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A Dream Interpretation Journey
I tried to slowly work into embracing my emotions, but at a certain point I knew it was time for the explosion. I got alone with the Lord and prayed for about an hour. I believe I cursed in almost every sentence.
I started out by expressing my anger against people. It came out in a torrent. Still, I was surprised at how scriptural it was (aside from the curse words). The main fuse that was setting off the explosives was my concern for my children. I saw them, to one extent or another, being affected by the sin in the world around them, and I knew the damage that might result. I also knew that my ability to protect them was limited.
I had always tried to be merciful and loving toward people in the world. One friend who wasn’t a Christian had said about me that if all Christians were like me, the whole world would be Christians. …But that was before I saw people putting pressure on my children. In the months before my curse word filled prayer, rage had been building in my heart over the ignorance and carelessness of those who wanted to drag them down into sin with them.
As I prayed, I let the rage rise. I honestly poured it out before God, telling Him exactly what I felt. I wanted to call down fire from heaven (Luke 9:54-56). I had never before felt threatened enough to be this angry, but with my children’s lives on the line, I was furious.
I didn’t care if the fire consumed me also. I felt like such a failure. Here I was saying more foul words in one prayer than I had heard in any conversation in my entire life! How could I be in this state after walking with Jesus for so long? My life seemed like a waste. I might as well die.
At that point, I started to sob. I said, “Father, I don’t feel like You have given me the kind of grace I have needed. I feel like I have built my life out of chewing gum and tooth picks – taking a little bit here and a little bit there and pasting it together into something that keeps me going. I couldn’t overcome sin, so I cheated it. When it overwhelmed me, I disconnected from my emotions and wrenched myself from the longings of my heart. I outlasted it by choosing over and over to suffer rather than to give in. I outthought it by studying and learning more than almost anyone I know. …Where is Your power? How could what I experience be an expression of Your love?”
I replayed the Indiana Jones dream in my head, and it comforted me. I was in the razor wire cage now, and as it had shown, I kind of wanted to die. Yet at the same time, I knew that God was with me. He seemed to say, “I am angry too. I agree with you that sin does incredible damage.” …Of course, I knew He wasn’t using all of the curse words I was, but He seemed to be much more concerned with holding me close and affirming me than with correcting me.
I sobbed because I was at last embracing the painful reality of what it is like to have a fragmented personality. I had suppressed it for so long, but now I was admitting what I was facing. I had treated the dangerous parts of me as if I could get rid of them. I had disciplined myself to disconnect from them and suppress them, hoping they would go away.
Now I was admitting that I had no human answer for them. All I could do was to lay the “different versions of me” before God and say, “This is who I am. I am a man who on the one hand gladly follows You and on the other is filled with rage. I don’t understand that, and I can’t change it without Your help. …But I also know that I can’t run from it any longer. I need You to be big enough to handle all of me – even the crazy parts.”
I sensed the Lord saying, “I am big enough.”
Then the prayer was over. As I walked home, I partly wanted a car to veer off the road and end my pain by hitting me. I was glad to see that the Lord had given me enough self-control that I didn’t jump in front of one. That was important. It told me that I could experience my worst emotions without doing something stupid. I hadn’t been sure if that would be the case, and I hoped it was a sign that God would indeed help me to limit the damage that my emotional experiment might cause.
I wondered if He would speak to me that night in a dream. Would He rebuke me? Would He comfort me? I wasn’t sure what to expect. The following is a part of one of my dreams from that night:
…I moved to my house on the other side of the ocean. There were big pipes that went into the ground and brought water to the surface. I went into the basement of the house, and found more pipes along with streams.
I picked my nose and tried to clean off the snot from my hand using the streams. I missed the water at first, but then I managed to clean it off my hand.
Then I crawled through some tunnels that connected everyone’s basements. There were streams in the tunnels also.
Water can be symbolic for spiritual life, but in this case, I believe it was symbolic for emotion. God was explaining to me what had started the night before. Finding pipes and streams was symbolic for God teaching me about my emotions. Going into the basement was symbolic for descending into the foundations of my soul. God was letting me know that He was going to help me to study my inner life like never before. I would stop saying that I was so messed up that all I could do was to lock up the dangerous parts of my personality and hope they went away. Instead, I would nonjudgmentally see them as they were while God taught me how He was going to transform them.
Many years later, when I studied Borderline Personality Disorder, I realized that what I was doing was a Christian form of a part of the treatment for that disease. It is where you don’t panic when your emotions are dysregulating. Instead, you study them, learn what they are doing, and wisely work through them.[17]
The dream also showed tunnels with streams between houses. The houses were symbolic for people, and the tunnels between them were symbolic for relationships. The streams in the tunnels showed the fact that our emotions play an important role in relationships. God was letting me know that as He healed me, I would learn how to relate to others better.
Finally, the dream showed me cleaning snot off my hand in the water. What could that mean? I didn’t understand it until about ten days later. Then I sensed the Holy Spirit impress me with the message: “In your mind and will, you are an adult, but in your emotions, you are still a child.”
He showed me that when I was young I hadn’t had the help I needed, and circumstances had overwhelmed my emotions. So I had developed survival techniques to handle them. I disconnected from them, buried them, or medicated them. Those survival techniques had kept my heart from spinning totally out of control, but they had also kept me from getting the practice I needed to grow properly. God was now fixing that.
When I compared that message to the snot in the dream, I thought about something I had heard Art Katz say years earlier. He had called an immature man a “snot-nosed kid.” I concluded that in this dream, snot was symbolic for immaturity.
The dream showed that when I tried to clean the snot off in the water, I missed the first time. I believe this was symbolic for the fact that I had tried to grow up emotionally when I was younger, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. The dream then showed me cleaning the snot off the second time. I believe this was symbolic for me now being at a point where Jesus would do this work. My time of getting to know Him in the Bill Gothard Mountains and the attic had made me ready to work through my issues.
In the weeks after this, I found myself meditating on the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). For the first time, I saw it through the eyes of the older brother. I could picture him enduring years of his little brother’s disrupting power games. I imagined the older brother attempting to be friends with the younger brother, and the younger brother sabotaging their relationship time and again. I pictured the younger brother goading him into fights, and when the older brother fought back, he was disciplined with the younger brother as if he had also been at fault.
Seeing the parable from the older brother’s perspective touched my pain. …I was like the older brother. I had wanted to reach out to people and tell them about the love of God in the same way I pictured the older brother wanting to reach out to his younger brother. Instead, they had tried to mislead my children, and they criticized me when I stood against that. I didn’t know how to handle that.
I sensed the Holy Spirit affirming my anger. Though I knew I should choose mercy and forgiveness, I also sensed Him joining me in my view of sin, expressing the same sentiment we see in this scripture:
”Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of offenses! For offenses must come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes!
The Holy Spirit impressed on me that the Judge of the earth considers the damage caused by sin to be real and serious. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that He plans to send people to hell for these sorts of actions.
”If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life lame or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet, to be cast into the everlasting fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire.
I believe these scriptures use exaggeration to make a point. The image of cutting off body parts is meant to wake us up to the seriousness of sin and its consequences, but repentance, faith, and obedience are the real solution, not amputation. Nevertheless, the message is clear. God is angry with those who choose sin, and especially with those who encourage others to sin. I sensed the Holy Spirit comforting me with the thought that these were the same people I was angry with.
Touching God’s anger in a way that affirmed my own was like a healing balm to my soul. He was saying that I was created in His image, and my anger, imperfect as it was, existed because sin should bother me. That is the appropriate response to seeing people hurt by it.
I hadn’t expected Him to affirm what was happening inside of me. I had thought I was just a vengeful person who deserved to be judged myself. Instead, He was saying that I couldn’t love well until I learned that love is honest about the damage brought by sin.
He did more than just affirm my anger, however; He also helped me to see the world through His eyes as a Father. The people who deserved judgment were His children. Though they had earned their fate, to Him they were like my children were to me. If my children deserved judgment, I would be brokenhearted and eager for them to be saved no matter what they had done. I would want others to forgive them and offer them mercy and truth.
How could I not do the same for God’s prodigal children? He cared for them with more love than I could ever have for my own children. What else could I do but forgive them and reach out? With people’s eternal fates hanging in the balance, there was too much at stake to hold onto unforgiveness.
God’s wrath and love were transforming my heart. I embraced His mercy for those who were hurting my children. I had never seen the situation clearly before, because I had always been able to insulate myself from the effects of sin. I was able to avoid the damage being done all around me by going off on my own to seek God until I found Him. Only when I feared for my children was I able to perceived the harm that had always been there. By seeing life though their vulnerability, I found perspective.
When any of us sin, we harm others. If nothing else, we encourage them to turn from God’s ways. Our unrighteousness suppresses truth, so we deserve wrath (Romans 1:18). Yet God loves us as a father loves a guilty son or daughter. Forgiveness is joining Him as He waits by the side of the road for His prodigal children to come home.
Two sides of my fragmented personality – mercy and judgment – were fusing together through a revelation of the heart of God. He was giving me yet another piece of the treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder. Putting it into psychological terms, I was practicing a Christian form of exposure therapy. I was exposing myself to the frightening contradictions in my soul so God could show me His ways to bring them together.
I can barely describe what this was like for me. I had struggled for years without finding answers. I lived in fear of an irreconcilable civil war fomenting within my heart. I was trying to hold back what felt like an inevitable emotional breakdown.
But God ran with me into this razor wire cage and brought me through it to a new life. He even gave me a dream to prepare me for the painful experience. He portrayed me as a spiritual Indiana Jones who would be able to handle the difficulties. He encouraged me to descend into the dark caverns of my soul and face my worst fears. Then He gave me another dream to show me what He was doing in those dark caverns. It showed me learning about emotions and washing away my immaturity. In all of this, He was holding me in His arms and bringing me into His goodness.
This took place twenty years ago. The basic approach I took that night – to embrace my emotions and find God’s heart for them – has spread from one area of my fragmented personality to another. He has slowly pulled the warring factions together. It has been a remarkable journey with rewards that are incredibly meaningful to me. Imagine Jesus taking you into your worst horror-movie-like issues and transforming them. That is what has happened to me.
In the introduction to this book I described how difficult it can be to interpret dreams – yet I have spent the past twenty-two years learning how to do it. This one example shows why it has been worth the effort. When so much was on the line, God used unexpected images like Indiana Jones, credit cards, a razor wire cage, streams, tunnels, and snot to guide me through my deepest turmoil.
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