Intepretating your dreams

Everybody has dreams.  But many people simply dismiss them as little night stories your mind tells you.  At least we do when we discuss our dreams with others because we want to appear educated and untroubled by whatever is in the world on the other side of our subconscious.  But at the same time, it is easy to wonder what is the meaning of all those strange circumstances and images that seem to flood your mind at night.  To date you may not have considered trying to get some interpretations of what you see in your dreams.  But it might be time to reconsider that approach and to give your dream life some serious consideration because it might be trying to tell you something.

The entire area of dream interpretation is misunderstood because too often it is connected to fortune telling.  The idea of going to a gypsy who reads the lumps on your head and uses cards to interpret your future is offensive to a thinking person.  So the first thing to understand is that looking for the meaning of your dreams is not fortune telling and it is not looking for messages from the great beyond that "the spirits" might be telling you in your sleep.  Those kind of Dream Interpretation systems exist but they are not all there is to trying to understand your dream life.

There is an approach to understanding dreams that is logical, scientific and based on what we know about the mind.  It is an area of study that has been a legitimate part of psychology for a long time.  Some of the greatest thinkers in the world of psychology and psychiatry such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung wrote serious scientific studies into the Meaning of Dreams and the value of understanding what they are saying for knowing your own mind.

"Know thyself" is one of the oldest philosophical ideas in our culture which dates back as far as the Greek thinkers that are the foundation of society as we know it.  But much of how we think and how our minds work is hidden from us.  The mind is a mysterious thing because a big part of how we think is the "intuitive" part of our minds and what happens in the subconscious.  So by understanding dreams, we can peek into what the subconscious is saying and it can help us understand ourselves a lot better.

So it is worth it to overcome any preconceptions you might have about looking at your dreams as something more than little night "movies" or stories.  The field of dream interpretation is not the occult or fortune telling.  By approaching it as part of knowing your own psychology and using dreams to connect to that other side of who you are which is your subconscious, you can get a lot of good from understanding your dreams better.  It will make you sleep better at night too and that is always a great goal for any of us.

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There may be no stranger world than what we experience in our dreams.  It is not uncommon to wake up from a dream feeling that it was so real that it is hard to shake off the images from the dream as you move into your day.  If you start talking to people about dreams, some will think they are funny or somehow expressions of your romantic fantasies.  But not all of your dreams can be explained away so easily.

If you can understand what your dreams are telling you, that would help you cope with them particularly if the dreams you are having are disturbing and leave you feeling uneasy, anxious or full of questions when you wake up.  For many years, very educated psychologists have studied and continue to study what dreams mean to us.  Yes, some dreams don’t have meanings.  But very well regarded experts in how the mind work like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had a lot of theories about what the subconscious was saying to us when we sleep.

What they suggest is that in a dream, we are seeing the merger of images from our memories, our imaginations, our fears and hopes as well as from input we have taken into our minds such as contents of movies or music.  But there are also common images that dominate society that almost always can be interpreted in a similar way.  These are cultural images that we just know about even if we don’t think about them.  Examples of shared cultural images and their meanings are…

.    A snake is almost always associated with fear and evil.  The cultural connection to Satan and damnation is very strong.
.    Santa Clause is an image that can represent happy childhood images, a positive adult role model or the anticipation of gifts. 
.    Clowns often can carry a good or a bad image.  If the associated emotion in the dream is happy, they can represent humor, imagination and fun.  But many fear clowns so if the associated feeling of the dream is unpleasant or fearful, the clown might represent a bad adult relationship from childhood, fear of authority or fear of what happens when the unknown merges with the commonplace.

These are just a few of the thousands of common cultural images that can appear in your dreams.  Knowing what cultural messages we may be projecting in that movie theater of the mind which is a dream can help you translate the images you see when you are asleep to understandable messages your subconscious is sending out.  That is why there are detailed dictionaries of dream images that have been compiled to help you understand your dream life. 

Many of the entries in these dictionaries come from famous psychologists like Jung and Freud.  If you have an image from your dreams that you suspect has meaning to you, consult these dictionaries to see what the cultural meaning might be.  It can be very helpful in understanding particularly bad dreams and by understanding them, resolve the fear or issue which can make the bad dreams go away.

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One of my big memories when I was a young boy was when my dad helped me understand how to take charge of my nightmares.  He told me something that if I was a skeptical adult like I am now, I would have said, "yeah right".  He said that I could seed my dreams.  The process he taught me was simple.  I was to decide what I was going to dream about.  Then the half hour before bedtime, I would put that thought into my head.  So if I wanted to dream about unicorns, I would read a storybook or watch a video about unicorns.

Then as I drifted off to sleep, he said to literally command my subconscious "Tonight we will dream about unicorns".  That, in theory would result in a nice pleasant dream about unicorns.  Now you are asking, well did it work?  Sometimes.  Like all impressionable children, I tried the technique with all my heart.  Sometimes I would dream about unicorns three night later when I was busy giving my mind something else to dream about.  And sometimes it really did work.  But one thing that happened when I took control of my dreams that I really didn’t realize until many years later.  By being proactive about making my dream life do something fun, the nightmares went away.

Now not all nightmares are that easily managed.  But what dad taught me is an important thing for us to know about our dream lives and that is that our subconscious minds are very responsive and very impressionable.  Your subconscious does not necessarily filter the difference between watching a scary movie or being involved in an actual scary situation.  Both go into the subconscious as data to be processed after you are asleep.  So by using your evening time to give your subconscious something to work on, very often it can help you have "sweet dreams".

The other big "bubble" that burst for me when I realized my dreams could be manipulated was any idea that dreams were somehow messages from beyond or even tremendously reliable as sources of information.  If my dreams could be reporting something they learned from watching "Alien" on television just as well as they could be telling me about the big job promotion I want, that is not a reliable guide for life.  Just knowing that can change how you feel about your dream life and how you handle it.  And it can give you control over that dream life to some extent.  And that is nice to have when you lay your head down to dream the night away.

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As a Christian, we have to look at our dream lives in a different light.  After all, in the Bible, it is not uncommon for God to speak to a person through his or her dreams.  It happened all the time.  So the question comes up, "Could God speak to you through your dreams and if so, how can you tell?"  Perhaps you have spoken to someone at church who said God told her what to do in a dream.  If so, you probably had mixed feelings about that.  But as Christian people, we want to be open for God to speak to us in any way He wants to.  If that is through a dream, we need to be prepared to hear what he has to say.

At the same time, you don’t want to jump the gun and think that every dream you have is the divine voice guiding your life.  We need some rules for how to listen to God that don't send us off on a wild goose chase just because we had a dream that was dramatic.  We all have lots of different kinds of dreams and many of them can cause us to be emotional or feel like we are in a transition in life.  If that is the voice of God speaking to you, you have to be able to tell the difference between a prophetic dream and just a dream that is dramatic and meaningful but not necessarily divine in origin.

Yes, it is true that in scripture God did speak to people through dreams.  So we have to grant that this is one way that God might speak to us.  God can be very creative in how he communicates to people and you could hear his voice in the breeze in the trees, in a message coming through your pastor or even in a casual statement made by your child.  The key is to have that "sensor" on in your spirit that alerts you when it is the voice of your master speaking.  When that alarm goes off, then it is time to pay closer attention whether the message comes through a dream or another source.

Do we have to seek interpretation if we have a dream that we think might be from God?  Well we have to remember that when that happened in the Old Testament, they did not have the ability to understand God's voice directly as we do in our New Testament relationship with him through Christ.  God is capable of speaking clearly to you if he wants you to know something.  So you can ask him to interpret directly and if he is really talking to you, you will come to understand the message.

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Biblical Dream Interpretation

There is ample evidence in the Bible when God talked to someone through a dream.  In some cases, there was a need for the interpretation of that dream.  Maybe the most dramatic example is when Joseph was given a spiritual gift to interpret dreams, which he used with the King.  That episode saved many lives and blessed God's people.  So as a child of God, it is appropriate to wonder if God might use you in that way and if so, how can you tell and what should you do?

There is no question that over the span of time covered by the Bible, the way He communicates with people has changed.  Most of the episodes of God speaking to his people through a dream happened in the Old Testament although not all of them are in that part of the book.  But since the coming of the Gospel and the introduction of the new birth along with Christ' teaching that the Holy Spirit will teach us directly, the need for God to talk to his people through dreams has diminished.  After all, if you have your morning devotions each day and God can tell you point blank what he wants you to do, why go through all the drama of a dream revelation to accomplish the same goal?

But, as we mentioned, there are New Testament evidences of God talking to someone through a dream.  The one that comes to mind is when God gave Peter the vision of the animals being lowered to him to eat in the book of Acts.  And we know God talks to us in strange ways all the time.  So to rule out dreams being used as communication would be hasty because we cannot limit God in how he might choose to talk to you or I.

There is another approach to a biblical approach to interpreting dreams.  That approach is to gauge what God tells you to do against the measuring rod of scripture.  If you have a dream and you think God was giving you direction, you must seek to confirm that it was God talking and that what he said "sounds like God."  We all have a lot of weird dreams and we cannot run around thinking every time we wake up with a dramatic image in our heads, that must be God's voice.

We need a measure to confirm that the dream was from God.  That measure is scripture.  God will never contradict himself.  So if he gives me directions in the dream, that calling must never go against God's law or come in competition or conflict with the Gospel.  If I think God is telling me to pray for my neighbor and the when God opens the door to do so, to share the Gospel with her, that is a perfectly valid dream calling.  That is in keeping with the Great Commission and it is in line with scripture.  Using the Bible as a measure by which all inspiration from God must conform, you are giving yourself protection from wrong callings or hearing God wrong.  And that is a very valid use of the bible in dream interpretation.

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