I am curious as to what members of this forum think about this. Does God still use dreams to speak to us?
Last night I had a very strange dream, it was the latest in a series of strange dreams. Basically a beautiful church/worship center was hiding (or was is blocking) the way to a horrid wasteland. In the dream, I thought that the waste land was the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna; it was only seen by entering through one specific back door. Inside the church I was meeting classmates from my Christian School and Church and learning how their lives were not so picture perfect after all. It was a strange and haunting dream. I get these sort of dreams maybe once or twice a month; to have two in a row (I had one the night before) is rare. Are these dreams just me and my subconscious or is God there too? If prayer really is a thing, why wouldnât God also be involved in the workings of our mind while in a dream state?
Am I just thinking too much about this, putting too much stock into what is just a biological function?
Everybody likes to argue about âmany ways vs. one wayâ to get to God. You donât often hear anybody asking âare there many ways to Hellâ. Probably because of Jesus referring to the ânarrow wayâ to life and the âbroad wayâ to perdition traveled by many. The presumptive teaching, I guess, is that hell is pretty easy to get to.
As to your larger question, I donât know why God wouldnât use dreams. Your last sentence with the phrase âwhat is just a biological functionâ [emphasis added] betrays a dichotomy weâre quite fond of poking at here. It has the embedded notion that something couldnât be both a âmereâ biological function and simultaneously from God. Maybe some undigested bit of meat in Ebenezerâs stomach is God speaking to Scrooge. To me the incarnation blows away our attempted dichotomies across all of these different arenas.
I usually am aware of my own dreams - aware enough that I even presume to âtake controlâ. So being fully aware (or at least aware or just awake enough) that this is âjust a dreamâ, Iâll usually have fun with it, and as Iâm falling off the cliff Iâll decide to sprout wings and fly around a bit. But thatâs my desire to be in control of things talking I guess. Last night I had one of those dreams that I was happy to wake up from because it was very real as it was happening. Suffice it to say, I was out happily running lots of errands, and then realized near the end of that bizarre âdayâ that it had been a school day and I had never contacted anyone to say I wasnât coming in (students have nightmares about missing classes or tests ⌠and yes, teachers have nightmares about being no-shows too.)
Oh, youâre lucky! I have had the recurrent dream about missing classes, though!
From a psychological standpoint, I have read varying theories. One review indicated that dreamsâeven terrifying onesâhelp us come to grips with fearful things in the real world. Some psychiatrists say that if things are out of control, itâs reasonable to suppress them (eg in severe PTSD) with alpha blocker blood pressure medications.
I donât know that God canât communicate with us via dreams; or any other means, for that matter. I am a bit nervous about taking anything as a message from God, though I am intrigued by your idea that something we eat can cause us to have thoughts that are appropriate.
I have read of dreams showing Jesus to Muslims; but I have also read of dreams confirming Islam to Muslims, so I donât think I can rely on that sort of thing as we get double messages!
In my personal readings of Matthew, I always took that verse to speak about righteousness rather than religion. As in: it is difficult to do the right thing⌠and easy to commit wrongs. Perhaps it even refers to the propensity of large groups to stray from righteousness; thus, in order to be righteous, one must often do differently than the crowd. (After all, it is easy to forget personal responsibility when acting as a part of a large group). Then again, I pretty much interpret the majority of the Sermon on the Mount to be about righteousness, and only about religion marginally.
But I could totally see Christians getting a more religion-centric message from it. I am a fan of the Sermon on the Mount. If I had to pick a favorite passage from the Bible. That would be it. Maybe Iâm just unconsciously emphasizing the ways in which it is most meaningful to me.
God does not speak to us, according to Jesus, the Word of God. Jesus promised to send the spirit of truth to teach and the comforter guide us. (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13) Actually it was always the Logos who communicated with humanity in OT times too. Yahweh = Jesus = Logos.
Indeed, which is why I question everything. It is why it has taken me so long to come back to Faith. Iâm still not 100% sure what exactly I believe but Iâm waiting. I am also studying. I start my Religious studies classes in a week. Looking forward to it!
I think it is the non-conscious part of consciousness which supports God belief. So naturally I think dreams are one of the prime pathways for getting in touch with the deeper unconscious. Sigmund Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconsciousâ and Jung felt that a dream was a âlittle hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psycheâ. Perhaps God as Christians understand Him makes use of dreams to bring things to our attention. Or maybe God just is something âinsideâ each one of us expressed in the deeper, less personal layers of consciousness as I think. Either way, I think dreams are worth noticing and on rare occasions Iâve felt that sense of seeing how some things in my life had more significance than I had given them after remembering a dream, as one can sometimes get from reading a great novel.
Itâs funny that I was just thinking about this after seeing the play Joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat. It does seem that it is one thing to have the dream and another to know how to interpret that dream! Whatever, it does seem that many cultures around the world have believed that they can derive direction and prediction of future events.
This raises a curious question of what are our dreams?