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A Dream Interpretation Journey
The thought that God might speak to us through dreams has fascinated people throughout history. And rightfully so! It is something that happened in the Bible (Genesis 40:8-23, 41:15-23, Matthew 1:21-22, 2:13), and it has also been promised as part of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit:
And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God,
That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your young men shall see visions,
Your old men shall dream dreams. (emphasis added)
Yet how many of us (even us old men) experience God speaking in this way? And how often should we expect to experience it? Once in a lifetime? Once a year? Every day?
I can’t say what the answers to these questions will be for you, but I can share what has happened to me. Over the past twenty-two years, I have recorded thousands of my dreams, and I believe I have received helpful insights from a large number of them. They have foreshadowed my future, warned me of mistakes, and helped me to walk my journey with the Lord. I shudder to think what my life would be like without them.
I realize that most people would not make a statement as strong as that, but I have seen how God has used dreams in my life. They have helped me to deal with potentially devastating issues. I can’t guarantee that anyone else will have that sort of experience, but based on the Scriptures, I believe God wants to use dreams in the lives of many. I have written this book in the hope that my story will help you to experience whatever it is that He wants to do in your life through your dreams.
Why do you complain to him that he answers none of man’s words? For God does speak – now one way, now another – though man may not perceive it.
(Job 33:13-14, NIV)
These words were spoken by Elihu, who was addressing Job’s complaint that God wasn’t answering him. Most translations say something like, “Why do you complain to Him, for He answers none of man’s words?” That translation gives the message, “God doesn’t have to answer you, so why bother complaining to Him?” I think the New International Version – “ Why do you complain to him that he answers none of man’s words?” – is better.
The Hebrew word ‘kiy’ in the above verse can be translated as either ‘that,’ ‘for,’ or a number of other options. The choice between them depends on the context. In Job 33, the next few verses give us the context, and they say essentially, “God may very well be answering you, but you do not perceive what He is saying.” In that context, it makes sense to translate ‘kiy’ as ‘that’ (NIV) rather than ‘for’ (other translations). We shouldn’t complain, because the real problem may be that we don’t understand Him rather than that He isn’t speaking.
How might He be speaking? One possibility is through a dream:
In a dream, in a vision of the night,
When deep sleep falls upon men,
While slumbering on their beds,
Then He opens the ears of men,
And seals their instruction.
In order to turn man from his deed,
And conceal pride from man,
He keeps back his soul from the Pit,
And his life from perishing by the sword.
These verses point out that through our dreams God can open our ears, seal our instruction, and protect us from threats. If this is true, what does it mean for us? Could we be missing messages from heaven because we are ignoring our dreams? What if there is a stream of useful information coming to us in the night, but we roll over and fall back to sleep?
Behold, God works all these things,
Twice, in fact, three times with a man,
To bring back his soul from the Pit,
That he may be enlightened with the light of life.
Not only does God speak …He repeats Himself. He sends the message twice, or three times – perhaps in different ways. It might come in more than one dream, through circumstances, through input from people, or in other ways.
This is good news, especially if we don’t understand our dreams. It means that God often gets His message through anyway, so missing what He is saying in a dream might not affect us much. Nevertheless, dreams can add to and clarify what He is saying. He wouldn’t speak through them if they weren’t important.
In 1998, I committed myself to finding out if God was speaking to me in dreams. One of the early dreams I wrote down and tried to interpret showed me swearing at one of my daughters and kicking a door shut between us. My best guess at an interpretation was that some difficulty would come up in my relationship with my daughter, and if I followed my natural sinful inclination, I would overreact and kick the door shut on a part of our relationship.
The dream scared me, so I prayed that God would help. As Job 33:17 says, I asked Him to turn me from my deed.
A while later, I had another dream. In it, I was an experienced basketball player, and I had a critical attitude toward a younger player on the team. The dream then showed me losing my sneakers and considering whether I should quit the team. It was an upsetting scene. I interpreted this to be another warning. I was going to be dealing with a young Christian (younger player), and if I was critical, I would regret it.
Shortly after recording the dreams, my wife and I learned that our daughter and her boyfriend were showing a lack of wisdom in some of their choices. I immediately thought of the dreams. Here was a situation in which I could easily overreact and say something stupid that would kick the door shut on my relationship with my daughter. It wouldn’t be hard for me to misread the situation, panic, and clamp down too strongly.
When I considered the basketball dream, my daughter’s boyfriend seemed to be the young guy it mentioned. If I overreacted, I could scare him away or create a rift that would be totally unnecessary.
I humbled myself and sought the Lord. I felt I needed to say something, but I was afraid to speak directly to either my daughter or her boyfriend. What if I overreacted? I proceeded carefully and wrote a letter to them explaining my concerns.
It was well received (which I am sure took a good deal of grace from God on their part.) The boyfriend is now my son in law, and he has told me many times how much the letter meant to him. He is a great blessing to our family and to others. I am shaken when I think of what we could have missed if God hadn’t used dreams to turn me from my deed.
I believe that anyone who honestly reads Job 33:15-30 will acknowledge that what I just described fits its pattern. God opened my ears, gave me instruction, and turned me from my deed (Job 33:16-17). If this sort of outcome is so obviously what this scripture teaches, why do so few of us really try to tap into it? The answers are simple:
Dreams are confusing. God may be speaking, but it can be tough to figure out what He is saying.
It can take a lot of work to interpret dreams.
We don’t hear many testimonies from those for whom dreams have made a significant difference (and that is part of the reason I have written this book).
Here is what I believe it is like to interpret dreams. It is like being dropped into a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. People around you are chattering. They may be telling you, “It’s going to be hot today, so bring some extra water to keep yourself from becoming dehydrated,” but we don’t understand a word of what they said, so we don’t bring water and end up thirsty. The next day, they say, “Watch out for the hole in the middle of the street,” and we go down the middle of the street and stumble into the hole without even knowing we missed their warning.
We might have a desire to learn their language, but there are problems. First, the people do most of their speaking in the middle of the night or in the early morning. If we don’t pay attention when they speak, we will hear very little of what they have to say.
We also can’t just listen for a few seconds. We generally must write down what they say and meditate on it. Otherwise, we probably won’t remember it or see its significance.
Then there is the problem that the language they use is full of symbols, and we don’t know what the symbols mean. To make matters worse, the symbols can be different for one person than they are for another. There tend to be similarities, so we can learn from one another, but you and I might have the same dream, and it could mean something different to each of us. (Which is one reason I try to avoid interpreting other people’s dreams unless I believe I have a prophetic word about the meaning. Generally, I help them with what the symbols might mean, but they must find the final interpretation.)
Finally, the language is fluid. A group of symbols may describe one lesson today, and then a year from now the same symbols may describe a different lesson. We have to be sensitive to the context to figure out what is being said.
All of this sounds pretty intimidating, and I understand why people give up on dreams. When I first tried to interpret them, I gave up on them for more than six years. Yet God eventually inspired me to write down and interpret thousands of dreams over the past twenty-two years. How did that happen? This book tells that story.
I need to make one more point before I move on. It is that though I believe the Bible teaches us that God can speak to us in dreams (Job 33:13-18), I do not believe the Bible gives us detailed instructions about how to interpret those dreams. As a result, almost every principle I will share about dream interpretation in this book will be something I have learned through experience.
To be sure, the Bible plays a part in these principles, but they are practical applications of what the Bible says rather than insights that are spelled out in the Bible. For example, one Biblical principle I will mention is that Jesus gives understanding and manifests Himself to those who are willing to do His will (John 7:17, 14:21). I see this as unquestioned truth that I seek to express in all of life by trying to obey and watching to see how He manifests Himself. With dreams, I found that while applying this principle to my life, some of the symbols in my dreams matched the ways in which Jesus was manifesting Himself. My dreams contained pictures of His work in my life. Though I didn’t have a specific Bible verse that told me that this would be the case, I experienced it often enough that I turned it into a practical principle for interpreting dreams: “Your life is a journey; a dream may be a snapshot of some piece of that journey.”
I point out the difference between principles spelled out in the Bible and those learned through experience because I treat what the Bible says differently than experience-based principles. The Bible is my unquestioned guide; it is foundational to everything. On the other hand, though practical insights are important, I can’t trust them in the same way I trust the Bible. They are only helpful, not authoritative. Everything in experience needs to be tested (1 Thessalonians 5:21).
I pray that this book will give you a set of practical principles that will help you to recognize messages that God is speaking to you in dreams. I encourage you to test them to see if and how they will work for you.
Bill Cadden, 2020
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