A very common experience we all have is to wake up with an emotion that we don't know where it came from.  You might wake up feeling usually happy even though it is a routine day with nothing extraordinary to explain your elation.  On the negative side, you might wake up feeling worried, nervous, depressed or frightened.  It is when the emotions you have coming out of sleep get this intrusive that you need some way to explain these emotions.  They can interfere with your life and create problems for how you conduct your day that you have no rational way of explaining.

What is happening is we are having dreams that are leaving behind those residual feelings.  But without the ability to interpret our dreams, we are victims of whatever our subconscious mind might have dug up to have us dream about.  And without the ability to recall and then understand those dreams, we will never be able to take charge of those random emotions and attitudes that may have come from a dream that is not relevant to your daily life at all.

Perhaps the first step to take to begin to interpret what your dreams are telling you is to get a better idea what your dreams are.  Most of us forget our dreams within moments after we wake up.  The emotions left form the dream might linger on but we quickly lose the content of the dream.  So a system to capture that content for interpretation is in order.  Keeping a dream journal is the primary tool psychologists advise to help us get the details of what was happening in the dream.

The journal does more than just capture that dream you can remember when you woke up.  It is a way of training your subconscious and your conscious mind to work together more closely.  If your conscious mind knows it needs to wake up and record important dreams that the subconscious generates, you will be less likely to just sleep through dreams that are very meaningful.  The subconscious will "break through" to the conscious world more often.  Then you can wake up, record the dream and go back to sleep.

Dream journaling is not an easy habit to get into.  You might wake up in the middle of the night with a dream to record and get lazy and tell yourself you will capture it in the morning.  But you know how dreams work and it will disappear by then.  But by keeping a notepad or tape recorder by the side of the bed, you can capture the important aspects of the dream.  When you do that, you give yourself the content of the dream to be interpreted and not just the residue of emotions that are left over from it.  Then you have something to work with and you can make progress understanding your dreams and resolving issues that they bring up.

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.