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A Dream Interpretation Journey
The experience of the previous chapter was amazing, but I still was only able to make sense of a small number of my dreams. Shortly after the Indiana Jones dream, however, I made a discovery that opened the floodgates of insight. To prepare to describe this discovery, let me ask a question: “Is there some way that we can consistently discern how the symbols in a dream apply to our lives?”
One possibility is that the Holy Spirit can prophetically show us what the symbols mean and how they apply. This was the approach I took when I first started interpreting dreams in 1991, yet I gave up on it because it happened so rarely. I waited for interpretations, but they never seemed to come.
Another possibility is that the symbols themselves tell us how to tie the dreams to our lives. Unfortunately, symbols usually aren’t specific enough for that; they could apply to many situations. Consider the Indiana Jones dream from the previous two chapters. I had a decent idea what the symbols meant; they told me about something scary and painful. But that could have referred to all sorts of different possibilities. What I needed to know was which scary and painful situation and what I should do about it!
If we can’t rely only on prophetic messages or symbols, maybe circumstances are the key. They certainly played a part in interpreting many of the dreams I have shared in this book. But remember, in spite of spending many hours studying my dreams, I could only make sense of a small number of them at this time. Circumstances, even when mixed with symbols and prophetic insights, left me confused about the rest. Was there something I was missing that could make my efforts more fruitful?
In the year 2000, I discovered a key that pulled together everything I had learned from the past two years of experimentation with my dreams. It made it so I was able to get at least a small amount of help from most of them.
This key combined a lesson I had learned from the book of Proverbs with the idea that our dreams help us interpret our journey and our journey helps us interpret our dreams.
What was the lesson from Proverbs? It was that God pours out a steady stream of wisdom from heaven. He is setting before each of us a sequence of instructions that we can learn to grasp. If we do, our life turns into a classroom in which He trains us for His purposes. If we don’t, we tend to suffer loss.
Wisdom shouts in the street, (NASV)
She raises her voice in the open squares.
…She speaks her words:
…Turn at my rebuke;
Surely I will pour out my spirit on you;
I will make my words known to you. (emphasis added)
Proverbs promises that God is laying before us the insights we need for life (Wisdom shouts in the street). There are all sorts of helpful lessons we can learn day after day. All we have to do is to put in the work required to recognize what they are and to act on them.
Then Proverbs chapter 2 makes an amazing statement about this training. It says the insights we receive are a form of God speaking to us:
For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding;
This verse changed my life. I had thought that I was only hearing from God when I had an obviously prophetic experience – and unfortunately, that meant that I wasn’t hearing much. I just didn’t get many prophetic messages. I longed to hear more, but I couldn’t figure out how.
Once I knew that knowledge, understanding, and wisdom came from His mouth, I felt as if heaven had opened and His heart was being steadily revealed to me. He was personally teaching me day by day as I came to grips with the practical issues of my life. My experience of His involvement took a great leap forward as I explored the challenges before me with the belief that He was personally teaching me.[18]
The way this worked out in practice was that I learned to perceive when He was bringing my attention to activities in which I could both gain and live out wisdom. I might hear someone mention a subject that seemed important, and I would focus my attention on it. I might be faced with some circumstance that called for me to grow up, and I would humble myself and patiently learn what I needed to do. I might become aware of some lack in my life, and a ministry would cross my path that spoke to that lack. In situation after situation, I did my best to recognize when God was speaking through wisdom shouting in the street.
My big breakthrough in dream interpretation came when I realized that my dreams were often prophetic snapshots of this process. The sometimes-gritty task of digging insights out of everyday life (wisdom) was being partially narrated by a set of symbols in the night (dreams). …And to my surprise, the symbols often preceded the wisdom. They acted as previews of what was coming.
This let me carry them into the details of my daily challenges like flashlights that shed light on what was happening. They made it possible to spot and focus on lessons I might have otherwise missed. As I said earlier, my dreams helped me interpret my journey, and my journey helped me interpret my dreams.
This makes sense. Both wisdom and prophetic dreams come from God’s mouth; why wouldn’t they build on one another? Here are some principles I came up with:
Dreams (at least my dreams) tend to precede the other ways in which God speaks by a few weeks. They often give insight into what He is about to do. Because of this, the best time for me to interpret a dream is usually 3 to 6 weeks after I have dreamed it. By that time, the reality pictured by the dream is unfolding in my life, which makes the interpretation clearer.
Dreams from the same period of time often show different angles on the same subject. They are snapshots of different pieces of the wisdom God is speaking. So once I know the subject of one dream, this can shed light on the interpretation of the dreams before and after it.
Multiple dreams from the same night, especially, tend to be variations on a theme.
Because of these observations, I shifted my interpretation habits to the following, which I have practiced for the past nineteen years.
I write my dreams down when I wake up at night.
I try to look at the dreams and interpret them the next day, but I usually don’t understand them. I am often dumbfounded about what they might mean.
I try to spend time each day looking at some dreams from 3-6 weeks previously. At that time, I often find that some scripture, message from the Holy Spirit, book, teaching, circumstance, or other occurrence has brought the light I need to interpret the dreams.
When I catch a theme in one dream, I look at the dreams before and after it to see if they might contain variations on that theme.
I don’t try to be overly prophetic or overly certain about my interpretations. I put together theories and test them to discern if they are from God. I expect to make mistakes and to learn from experience.
As I have done this, God has opened a river of insight that has amazed me and transformed my life. He has taken many confusing dreams that were difficult to interpret and made them meaningful.
On the fourth disk of his teaching series, Advanced Dream Interpretation,[19] Benny Thomas lists three levels of dreams. These levels are determined by how difficult a dream is to interpret:
Level 1 dreams are those that don’t need much interpretation. They contain a message that is literally true. Several dreams in the Bible were like this. For example, in Matthew 1:18-25 an angel spoke to Joseph in a dream, telling him that Mary’s child was of the Holy Spirit and he should name Him Jesus. No interpretation of symbols was needed.
Level 1 dreams are rare. Level 2 and level 3 dreams are more common.
Level 2 dreams need to be interpreted, but they contain a fairly complete message, and it is not hard to see how it applies to our lives. We can become fairly certain of the interpretation once we understand the symbols and see how they fit. Pharaoh’s dream about the fat and skinny cows was an example of a Level 2 dream (Genesis 41:17-32). The meaning of the dream was clear once Joseph explained the symbols, and the events the dream spoke of were straightforward after that. The Indiana Jones and the Razor wire cage dream was an example of a Level 2 dream from my life. It contained a fairly complete message that described a set of events that occurred fairly quickly after the dream.
Level 3 dreams contain an incomplete message, and that message may be fulfilled in unexpected ways over a good deal of time. We may understand the symbols, but it is impossible to see what we should do with them without combining them with other insights, often in difficult ways.
Joseph’s dream about his brother’s sheaves bowing to him is an example of a Level 3 dream (Genesis 37:5-8). The symbols were fairly easy to understand – they said that Joseph would be in a position of leadership among his brothers – but it was not at all clear how God would fulfill that message. The dream didn’t mention Joseph being sold into slavery, going to prison, being raised up by Pharaoh, or the famine that brought his brothers back to him.
I suspect that Joseph expected his brothers would quickly recognize God’s call and bow down as the dream had foretold. Why else would he have told His brothers about it? His approach might have worked with a level 2 dream, because the fulfilment would have followed quickly, but with a level 3 dream, his approach backfired. It angered his brothers, who then sold him into slavery. At that point, any hope that the dream would be fulfilled seemed totally divorced from reality. It wasn’t until many years later that the full meaning became obvious (Genesis 42:8-9, 50:18).
The majority of my dreams are Level 3 dreams (and from what I have learned from Benny Thomas, this is true for most people). Level 3 dreams are small snapshots of a journey that only becomes clear as we combine them with many other pieces of what God is doing. Benny Thomas compares Level 3 dreams to receiving a sentence one word at a time. We need to gather the individual “words” from many dreams and experiences and look for the Holy Spirit to show us how to pull the pieces together into a message.
Another feature of Level 3 dreams is that they generally do not produce major life changes by themselves. We often need to interpret one dream after another for months or years before we reach major breakthroughs. Each dream helps with a small step in the journey. Their value comes not from a quantum leap forward but from many lessons working together to slowly unfold the path God has chosen.
Because of this, most of the dreams I have shared so far in this book have been a little misleading. They have been Level 2 dreams that have played significant roles in my life. Rather than being like individual words in a sentence, they have been like entire chapters.
This made them helpful examples, because it was easy to see their value, but they don’t represent the vast majority of dreams. Most dreams lack the “wow factor” that makes them interesting or convincing. There are no outstanding victories won, mysteries explained, or insights given. Each dream just adds a little insight that helps us move a step further into God’s will.
This often makes our confidence in our interpretations of Level 3 dreams far less certain than Level 1 or Level 2 dreams. Without significant life events to back up our discernment, it is more open for debate.
My experience has been that I can receive many benefits in spite of this lack of certainty. Dreams are a part of wisdom shouting in the street. Each piece of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom I gain from them might not seem all that impactful by itself, but the weight of a storehouse full of insights becomes a force to be reckoned with. God stores up wisdom for the upright (Proverbs 2:7), and He loves it when we let Him move wisdom from His storehouse to ours (Proverbs 10:14).
In order to give a realistic view of what Level 3 dreams are like, the next three chapters discuss a few of them that I was interpreting while writing this book in the summer of 2019. It was only as I put them together and combined them with what God had been doing in my life for many years that I grew in confidence that I had the right interpretations.
When I first started writing these chapters, I had hoped to give examples that didn’t seem all that significant or convincing. Though I knew that this might be a little boring, I wanted to present some dreams that were more typical of the majority. To my surprise, however, the dreams became extremely significant. There were some outstanding victories won, mysteries explained, and insights given. It seems that the Holy Spirit had different plans than I did.
The dreams did not start out that way, however. So Chapter 8 contains dreams that are more typical. They were like individual words in a sentence that didn’t seem all that exciting. Then Chapters 9 and 10 describe a Level 2 dream that brought the sentence together in a way that surprised and touched me. The majority of dream interpretation is more like Chapter 8 than like Chapters 9 and 10.
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