In the opening episode of The Christian Jung’s Dreams Arc, Angela Meer makes the case that the biblical record has always treated dreams as a legitimate channel of divine communication -- and that the church’s dismissal of dreams as ‘pizza dreams’ or spiritually irrelevant is not a biblical position. It is a cultural one, shaped by Enlightenment rationalism and absorbed into Western Christianity over the last three centuries.

Angela walks through the density of dream material in Scripture: Jacob’s covenant at Bethel while asleep on a stone, the Joseph narrative whose entire arc begins with two dreams, the infancy of Jesus protected by the dream obedience of his father Joseph, and Joel 2:28 quoted by Peter at Pentecost as evidence of the Spirit’s outpouring.

She also shares something personal: she always knew God spoke in dreams, even when her tradition laughed at the idea. When the Charismatic and Catholic Charismatic Renewal gave her language and a framework for interpretation, it did not feel like new information -- it felt like vocabulary for something she had already recognized. And she speaks directly to the listener who has been quietly nodding along, who kept that knowing private, who was not sure they were allowed to take their own dreams seriously.

This episode also introduces Carl Jung’s observation that modern Western Christianity is historically anomalous in dismissing the dream -- and sets the stage for ten weeks of Scripture, depth psychology, and the recovery of a practice the serious Christian was never supposed to lose.

Scripture covered: Genesis 28:10-17, Genesis 37:5-11, Matthew 1:20-21, Matthew 2:12-13, Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17, Numbers 12:6

Find the full written article and the paid tier companion on Substack as The Christian Jung. Search The Christian Jung or visit angelameer.com.

Awaken Holy Wonder.

Show Notes

Scripture: Genesis 28:10-17 | Genesis 37:5-11 | Matthew 1:20-21 | Matthew 2:12-13 | Joel 2:28 | Acts 2:17 | Numbers 12:6

Key terms:

Dream incubation: the ancient practice of sleeping in a sacred space for the purpose of receiving divine communication through a dream -- practiced in Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew cultures

Nepsis: the Desert Fathers’ term for watchfulness or sobriety; applied to dreams, it means receiving them attentively without credulity or dismissal

Compensation: Jung’s term for the dream’s tendency to supply what is missing from conscious life -- a concept introduced in later weeks

Links: Free article | Inner Room | angelameer.com | Awaken Holy Wonder.

Keywords

Christian dreams, biblical dreams, God speaking in dreams, Jungian dream interpretation Christian, dream theology, Christian depth psychology, contemplative Christianity podcast, inner healing Christian, Angela Meer, dreams Bible, Joseph dreams Genesis, spiritual formation podcast, Christian psychology

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Christianity, dreams, Jungian psychology, inner healing, spiritual formation, biblical dreams, contemplative prayer, Christian podcast, depth psychology

In the first episode of the Foundations series of The Christian Jung, Angela Meer begins ten weeks on the foundations of Christian contemplation and what Carl Jung’s psychology can teach us about the soul. She starts with the word numinous, coined by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in 1917 for the awe-filled, holy otherness of God, and she shows how Jung borrowed it to describe the way people meet the holy in dreams, visions, and ordinary life. She tells the story of Rowland Hazard, Ebby Thacher, and Bill Wilson, and of the 1961 letter in which Jung named the cure in three Latin words: spiritus contra spiritum, Spirit against spirits.

Angela grounds the episode in Scripture: Jacob waking at Bethel in awe, Jesus offering living water to the woman at the well, His declaration that God is spirit and seeks those who worship in spirit and truth, Daniel’s vision of the Ancient of Days, and the invitation of Psalm 46 to be still and know. She shares a dream in which she met God as the Ancient of Days, and the night she spent afterward not analyzing it, only receiving the awe.

The episode teaches three movements from mental assent into encounter: truth is held, not traded; thirst is a signpost, not a sin; and encounter needs a container. It closes by praying the Jesus Prayer together, followed by Augustine’s prayer from the Confessions to the Beauty of ancient days.

Find this week’s free article and the paid companion with the full guided practice of the Jesus Prayer on Substack by searching The Christian Jung, and find the free weekly letter at angelameer.com.

Awaken holy wonder.

Show notes:

Scripture referenced (World English Bible): Genesis 28:16-17; John 4:13-14; John 4:23-24; Daniel 7:9; Daniel 7:15; Psalm 46:10; Luke 18:13; Luke 18:38.

Key terms: Numinous (Rudolf Otto’s 1917 term for the awe-filled, holy otherness of God, from the Latin numen). Mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto’s phrase for a mystery that makes us tremble and draws us in). Spiritus contra spiritum (Jung’s phrase in his January 30, 1961 letter to Bill Wilson: the Spirit against the spirits of addiction). The Jesus Prayer (an ancient prayer of the Desert Fathers and Mothers: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me).

Prayer: Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book X (translated by E. B. Pusey).

Heal Deeply. Walk Holy.

Keywords (12): numinous encounter with God, Rudolf Otto numinous, spiritus contra spiritum, Carl Jung and AA, Rowland Hazard Jung, woman at the well John 4, God is Spirit, Ancient of Days dream, Augustine Confessions prayer, holy awe and wonder, contemplative prayer podcast, Jungian psychology and faith

Tags (7): Christianity, contemplative prayer, Jungian psychology, Christian podcast, spiritual formation, mysticism, prayer

Links (copy-paste ready):

Substack article: https://angelameer007.substack.com/p/3d524d25-1e01-482d-8cb0-0940d6a58bd2

Website: https://www.AngelaMeer.com

We’ve been taught through sound theological arguments. Our apologetics are solid. Our arguments for our methodologies are locked shut. Hermeneutic. Exegesis. Academic writing. Good job, us. But there is an undercurrent in Christianity right now that is swaying the tide back to an ancient way. Back to Spirit. Let’s not forget our Truth, with a capital T. But let’s not forget that one of the clearest descriptors of God in the New Testament is John 4, God is Spirit.

And maybe, like me, you’ve been hearing God whisper something to you that sounds a lot like surrender. We are being asked to surrender our minds to His loving grasp, and to wander the high school hallways again, back to our less-comfortable notions about what it means to worship a God who is Spirit.

Where We Are in this Journey

We are starting a new article arc this week: ten weeks of foundational insights into contemplative Christianity and what, in the world, it has to do with Carl Jung’s psychology.

This week, we are talking about the soul and what the soul is starved of, which I believe is a truly human grasp of how our souls commune with God. We are going to look at the word “numinous” and how that word describes a God encounter in ways that often supersede words.

The next ten weeks will look at the soul in psychological and contemplative ways to understand how it speaks, how it communes with God, and how it is formed. By the end, you will feel at rest in your souls. And that, we need in spades, right now.

Carl Jung and the Soul

In 1917, a German theologian named Rudolf Otto coined the term “numinous” from Latin to refer to God as something beyond what our descriptive language can provide. It’s the feeling of awe, wonder, the old Bible translation words like “fearful” and “awesome.” Maybe it’s similar to word holy, which many translate as meaning “other” just radically different. Carl Jung adopted the phrase "numinous" to describe the symbolic associations with God that many had in their dreams, imaginations, visions, and/or waking synchronicities.

This word does something to me, and maybe to you too, and it reminds me that God isn’t just mental or intellectual knowledge. And I often need that reminder. God wants to encounter us in numinous ways, but we rarely have containers to do that. This 10-week series introduces those containers.

My Experience with a Numinous Dream

A few years ago, I had a dream.

It was night, and I was walking onto a dock that jutted out into a still lake. I stood at the edge of that dock and looked into the water below. From the depths of the water, I saw something slowly emerge. It was larger than any creature I had ever seen, and its eye – its enormous eye - was all that I could see. The eye looked up at me, and that feeling of numinosity came over me. I knew that this creature knew me. That I was known by it, and that it loved me. But at the same time, its sheer size, antiquity, and strangeness were awe-inspiring and terrifying in feeling.

I woke up in total peace, but in an overwhelming sense of wonder. I knew I had encountered God as the Ancient of Days in that dream.

That night, as I lay in bed. I didn’t use my mind. I didn’t think. Instead, I let the feeling of awe wash over me, over and again. The dream was an invitation to wonder and be filled with awe.

These moments are not just rare, they’re absolutely transforming. If we let them be. We just don’t always know how to name these types of experiences, but we should let ourselves exist in the space of feeling His holiness – His otherness – and His ability to transform us vitally over and over again.

If you are interested in going deeper than just pure intellectualism with God, then I invite you to our paid Substack tier at $12/month. There, I teach you ancient contemplative Christian exercises that draw on Carl Jung’s psychology to foster wholeness of soul, mind, and body.

In the following article for paid subscribers, I will be showing:

• A guided practice of the Jesus Prayer, breath by breath, beginning with your body

• Journaling questions to help you notice what the prayer released in your emotions and your body

• How to write down the symbols, dreams, and memories that surface, and how to discern what is and isn’t from God

• A simple habit tracker for trying the practice every day this week

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In the following article for paid subscribers, I will be showing:

• Where Christian contemplation began, from the book of Acts to the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt, and how their practices held tr…

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This week, we are wrapping up a series on the dreaming life and how God utilizes your dreams to help you understand your soul’s needs. We have covered everything from why the Bible uses dreams to how the early church viewed them, what sort of journaling you should keep, and why interpreting dreams should be the last step.

When we undertake the subject of Christian dreaming, we understand that we are stepping into a tradition that is at least 5000 years old and that the early church in the first couple of hundred years after Christ wrote and taught a lot about the discernment practices that were used, as well as understanding the types of dreams that came. In our paid subscriber series, we covered this topic in great detail so that you can start hearing from God as a devotional practice.

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AI versus Dreams

I don’t want to get too philosophical, but we are in an age where many people are extremely wary of the AI advances. My BA was in Emerging Media, and my MA’s are both in Jungian Depth Psychology, so I am positioned to understand why and where humans exist in this technological hierarchy. Additionally, both my husband and I rely upon technology due to our disabilities and health issues (I have Cerebral Palsy, he has type 1 diabetes), and this interdependence on technology with our human biology will only increase over the years. So, I am writing from a space today that looks at AI both critically as a Depth Psychologist and with a great deal of hope, as someone with a degree in Emerging Media.

What we all need to understand is that AI can already outsmart us in the Bible, various methodologies, theories of exegesis, historical and archaeological findings, and many other areas. Because we have been excellent “Bereians” (those who studied the word of God in Berea, Greece, when Paul was traveling through), the internet is filled with amazing articles that help AI build its understanding.

However, AI cannot dream.

Now, perhaps one day dreaming will be part of an AI feature, but what I’m trying to help you understand is that dreaming is a highly personalized language between you and God: AI will never touch that aspect of our soul. We are dreamers because we are created in the image of God, and some things, like our intelligence, can be co-opted by AI, but our dreams cannot. Our dreams are a very special part of our created nature.

When we engage with the dreaming life, we engage with the soul’s attempt to commune with God, or remember its way back to pre-fall Eden. Dreams open a doorway to the next transformative step your soul needs to understand its purpose: to be a son or daughter of God (Romans 8). Dreams enhance our ability to become that son or daughter.

Dreaming as Art

When I first started tracking my dreams 25 years ago, I was very detailed and dreamt prolifically. It was odd if I wasn’t up several times a night writing down dreams in painstaking detail, like a plot of a movie. And those of you who have read this entire dream article series know that that is no longer how I suggest you do it. First, because a practice like that isn’t sustainable, mainly because its rooted in fear. There’s a fear that if I miss one dream, its message, or the importance, I’m missing what God wants me to know. Let’s not strengthen that type of fear-rooted perfectionism.

What I’ve done up until about a year ago, though has been to track the:

· Emotional tones

· Major symbolic moments

· Big action of the dream

· And usually only after coffee

Now, writing your dreams right after you wake up is a good idea if you can do it without it becoming a “have-to” ritual. For me, when I first wake up (before coffee), I tend to analyze a dream away, and it’s not until I’ve had my coffee that I am in the headspace to honor the message. But you do you.

Then, last year, everything changed.

I was studying Carl Jung’s mandalas and the Lord spoke to me. He told me it was time to start illustrating my dreams, instead of writing them down as a journal entry. I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t thrilled at the suggestion. I do create art often, but I’m rarely in the headspace to do it, except maybe 1-2 times a year. You yourself might know of several objections to God with a suggestion like that, too. You might think:

· I can only draw stick figures badly.

· I don’t have the time

· I can barely journal my dreams, let alone illustrate them

· I’m not artistic

And I’m not discounting any of those objections. But I am going to challenge you.

Why Art is Pivotal to Your Dream Journal

Remember what I said in weeks 1 and 2 of this dreaming article arc: God uses symbols to convey information. God uses a universal language of symbols both in the Bible, in parables, and in our dreams. This is a way that he conveys information, for a reason. Symbols aren’t fixed; they transform. They mean different things to different people, which is exactly why he uses them. God uses symbols to help you build a personal relationship with Jesus, one that is strengthened by NOT UNDERSTANDING your dream life!

So when God asked me to illustrate my dreams, not write them down, I struggled. What I didn’t realize was that I was already “translating” the dream from symbols into English when I “wrote down” my dreams. And translation always loses some essence of meaning, which is why most theologians have to train in Greek and Hebrew to assess the Bible.

By returning to the same “language” of my dream when recreating the symbols, I’m actually taking the time to think about the dream in its original form. I’m thinking things like:

· Does that color truly represent the image in my dreams?

· Why are there so many upward spatial planes in my dreams recently?

· Does this symbol (a mirror) look like this other thing (a spoon), and can that help me understand its meaning?

As you can see, these types of questions come up in illustrated dream journals in a way that would never come up in a written one, mainly because we are staying within the same vehicle of language: symbols!

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Carl Jung was an Artist

Jung was the first one that I know of in modern day to keep an illustrated dream journal. In fact, I read one review of his artwork, and the reviewer said that Jung would have become famous for his art if he had allowed the art world of the day to receive him as an artist rather than as a psychologist. Jung worked with watercolors, oils, calligraphy, stonework, and architecture. He never saw himself as an artist; he saw himself as someone who needed art to understand his soul.

Jung began doing this when he realized his rational brain tended to extract only intellectual meaning, not the meaning of the soul. Just think about that for a moment. How often are we reinforcing our intellect, rather than our soul? Using art is one way for us to pull out of an AI-dominated space and into the true place of being human. It started one day when Jung was at Bollingen, a tower he built on Lake Zurich, and he decided to build a castle from the materials on the ground, just as he had as a child. Totally immersed in his project, he began to connect the dots and make meaning in places he did not expect. In fact, play became an integral part of Jung’s work, and anyone who needs to disconnect from the rational world in order to understand what God is speaking to their soul.

Using the Last 9 Weeks

Words will flatten the depth of your dream life; illustrating them will invigorate it. However, I’d rather you journal them SOMEHOW rather than not at all. Additionally, if you feel like you are the kind of person who just can’t make art, consider other ways of being artistic: here is a picture of one of our students who re-created the castle of her heart using AI. No art skills were needed, but she was still able to have dimensions of understanding open up in ways she hadn’t expected.

If you feel as though you are really leaning into this material and want to know more, I want to invite you to “Return to Awe” an e-course happening this fall blending art, theology and depth psychology. We eill go into these practices together and learn the art of dreaming in a way that will really strengthen what you’ve learned over the last 10 weeks.

A Return to Awe — This Fall

* Blends art, theology, and depth psychology into one practice, so you finally have a framework for the dream life you’ve been having alone for years.

* Built for the Christian who has the doctrine down and still feels like something’s missing on Sunday night.

* Go deeper into God’s love than a sermon can take you. This is an encounter, not an explanation.

* Real-time, personal feedback from Angela on your own dreams. Not a symbol dictionary. A direct response to what God is actually showing you.

* An interactive lab, not a lecture series. You’ll turn a dream’s central image into art, journaling prompts, nature walks, and more.

* Guided group contemplation in the same ways that the early church fathers did it.

Spots are limited because this is about community, not the masses.

Early-bird wait list gets first access when doors open, before the general public even hears about it. Join by clicking here.

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Image: A student of mine used AI to picture the rooms of her soul, just like St. Teresa’s Interior Castle.

In this week's free article, we learned how art naturally lends itself to dreams and their interpretation. In this week’s paid article, I’m going to do the same thing I usually do: take you past the what of the article and into the how. We will be:

• Answering the four objections that stop most people before they start, including the one almost nobody says out loud

• Setting up a dream art space in under ten minutes, using supplies you almost certainly already own

• Walking a five-day practice that takes you from a blank page to one finished, illustrated dream entry, even if you have never drawn anything in your life

• Learning the four questions that only ever surface when you draw a dream instead of describing it, and what each one tends to reveal

A Five-Day Practice: From Blank Page to Your First Illustrated Dream

Before we begin, one promise and one warning.

The promise: by the end of day five, you will have one complete illustrated dream entry. Not a habit yet. But you are on the way.

The warning: at some point during this week, probably day four, you are going to feel foolish. You will look at what your hand has made, and some old voice will tell you this is a waste of a perfectly good evening. I want you to expect that voice so it does not surprise you into quitting. It shows up for everyone, including me, and it is never right. And I will give you tools to push through anyway.

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Here we are in week 9, and I did something with you that maybe you just noticed now: I built the foundation for dream interpretation before I actually taught it. That is because I’ve taught this for 25+years now, and I actually understand that interpretation is the last step of the journey. We are going to dive into interpretation a bit today and next week, so you have the foundations down. And if you want to learn more about using your dreams to enhance and empower your walk with God, I offer courses that blend depth psychology, art, and theology to give you a roadmap to do so. You can sign up for the waitlist here:

Where We Are on the Journey

For eight weeks, I’ve given you a solid foundation of dream interpretation. In weeks 1 and 2, we covered Biblical dream interpretation and how the early church interpreted dreams. We covered why we don’t do dream interpretation in the church anymore and why that is such a painful disconnect from our spirit. In weeks 3-8, we covered the foundations of dream interpretation, such as recognizing and responding to the emotions in our dreams, symbol excavation, discernment practices and how to be spiritually formed through your dreams.

If you want to keep informed about all the ways that God is speaking through your dream life, keep following us here so you can get the emails to your inbox.

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A 15-Year Dream Interpretation

I once had a dream that took fifteen years to interpret and twenty years to come true.

I was prolific enough as a dreamer and interpreter at the time to recognize immediately what I had received. There are different kinds of dreams, and this particular dream carried a weight I had learned to recognize: bigger on waking than most dreams, the symbols felt significant in a way that resisted immediate explanation, the sense that this was not about last week but about the next long season of my life. I call these dreams. Not all dreams are created equally. This one gave me instructions for an extended future I could not yet see.

And I could not interpret it.

I took that dream to every trusted counselor I had. People who knew me, who knew the Scriptures, who knew something about dreams and spiritual discernment. Many people tried to interpret it. But it just never rang true. Nothing anyone offered, including my own attempts, fits the dream the way a true interpretation does. There is a particular feeling of rightness when an interpretation is correct. I was looking for that feeling, and it never came.

So, every few years, I would pull out my journal and re-read the dream. I would try my hand at interpretation again, with whatever additional life experience and spiritual depth I had accumulated since the last attempt. And nothing.

Fifteen years of that dream sitting in my journal, interpreted by no one.

The Key that Unlocked It

Fifteen years later, almost 5 years ago, major events in the church started happening: people were being exposed for being frauds in their private lives and then standing in pulpits that Sunday. The exposure movement is still going on in the church, and it's not slowing down. But it wasn’t until the exposure movement began that the dream I told you about began to take shape: the major event in my dream was a semi-truck crashing in front of me. And then all of a sudden, in the midst of the church exposures, that image came rushing back, and the entire dream was interpretable, but only because the events of the world had caught up to my dream.

In John 14:26, it says, “…but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” Here is how the Holy Spirit partnered with me to interpret the dream:

· reminded me of the dream. For some of you, that could also mean that he reminded you of a dream the first time, after you’d forgotten it when you woke up. (Have you ever had a dream come rushing back midday? That is the Holy Spirit).

· showed me the symbol in the light of current events. He did this in a flash of insight. I was just able to recall the current events and the symbol, and they both illuminated each other in ways I couldn't have on my own.

· Once that first symbol was interpreted, the rest of the dream made an incredible amount of sense in light of that first symbol. The key was to have the dream's major activity (the semi-truck crash) interpreted first. Once it was interpreted correctly, the rest of the dream fell into place

· All of this happened while I was writing a blog article: so, don’t underestimate when or where the Holy Spirit illuminates a dream for you.

By exposing some major structural problems in the western church, God was showing me that I would rise above a calamitous time in the church and that my own ministry to help people develop a psychologically whole Christianity would flourish amid these exposures. It really was a life dream! It showed me why all the challenges of my ministry had been what they were, so I could learn to be available to a psychologically fractured church.

Why Interpretation Has to Be Taught Last

We’ve done a good job over the last 9 weeks of building a strong foundation for interpreting dreams, and that was intentional. You had to have some very basic skills in place (discernment, recognition of feelings, and habits to write down your dreams) because interpretation, at its most basic level, is not something you do. It’s something the Holy Spirit does. And if you partner with the Holy Spirit in the foundation, like we’ve taught you these last 8 weeks, He can build upon your obvious desire to hear Him by interpreting these dreams with you, and for you; instead of you interpreting them by dream dictionaries or interpretation techniques that rely on human skill.

Additionally, having the foundation primed helps with dreams like the one I’m using today: the Holy Spirit waiting 15 years to provide an interpretation. Just like Habakkuk, we need to PARTNER with God in our foundational skills in order to see what He will say, “I will stand myself on the ramparts to see what he will say, for the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it lingers, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay.” Habakkuk 2.

When we choose to have our foundations solid for receiving an interpretation for a dream, the Holy Spirit will cooperate with us. He wants to mature us into sons and daughters (Romans 8), and leaning into Him for spiritual insight, like dreams, means letting His life force flow through us rather than relying on our own intelligence (or memorizing dream imagery) from our own strength.

So, let’s review what those foundations are so that the Holy Spirit can partner with us in our maturation.

1. Focus on writing the emotional beats of a dream over the plot points (week 3 of the dream arc)

2. Recognize where symbols from your dream life are also appearing in your waking life (week 8 of the dream arc)

3. Let the feelings of a dream guide your inner work on areas in your life that God wants to develop in you. In these cases, the dream inspires action toward unhealed areas of your soul rather than offering an “interpretation.” Don’t miss this. This is where the good stuff of the abundant life in Christ resides. (Week 6)

4. What “work” is a symbol in your dream doing: what does the symbol feel like, what associations does it have, what Google facts can you find about it? The symbol can be thoroughly excavated with AI. (Week 4)

5. What Bible stories or verses does the dream relate to? (Weeks 1 and 2)

6. How have you discerned the dream? Are you making sure that you are not discerning it incorrectly just because the feeling tone turns you off? (Week 7)

7. How are people showing up in their dreams? And for what reason? (Week 5)

If you want the full dreams article series, with the paid inner room tier articles that take you deeper than these free ones, upgrade to the paid tier at $12/month.

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What Is Your Dream Posture?

The key is to recognize within yourself areas of distance that God is trying to close, so that you can become closer to Him. When you realize that dream interpretation is just about strengthening your walk with Jesus, you realize that it is directing how you show up in the world, in what ways you are an obstacle to your own growth, and how you can partner with God in more alignment.

This means that dreams often show you where pride or self-serving attitudes may be present. It’s not easy to receive a dream from God that shows you a better look at what is going on within you. It takes real maturity and patience with yourself to let God mold you from the inside. To truly let Him be the potter of your life. In fact, look at all the verses that refer to us as being shaped by God:

· Isaiah 64:8: “Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

· Jeremiah 18:1-6: God tells Jeremiah to go down to the potter’s house, where he watches a potter reshape a malformed clay pot on the wheel. God then explains, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does? ... Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand”.

· Isaiah 45:9: “Woe to the one who quarrels with their Maker, who is like a piece of broken pottery among the other pieces of broken pottery. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’”

· Job 10:9: “Remember that you molded me like clay. Will you now turn me back to dust?”

Dreams are this fast track (and quite fun, by the way) to the psychological shaping that Carl Jung saw happen in his patients when they brought him a dream.

Psychology and Religion: Jung’s Treatise on Religious Dreaming

In fact, in Psychology and Religion, Carl Jung utilized the dreams of patients who were atheists to demonstrate to the students at Yale University in 1937, that even atheists are being formed by God in their sleep. He refers to one patient who had a “religious voice” that came to him at night, which was totally opposite to his “scientific method” that he used as a scientist. The man eventually had to admit to Jung that the dreams had a “holy” nature.

In the Middle East right now, Muslims are coming to Christ in droves…mainly via dreams they are having. God is evangelizing people through their dreams!

And the same goes for you…dreaming is God’s way of shaping our souls for the work of ministry that He has called us to.

Pause ~ Pray ~ Heal

Pause: Where is God shaping you through your dreams right now? Sit on that thought for a moment and let God have access to the clay of your psyche once again.

Pray: A hymn of surrender after the writer, Adelaide Pollard (1907) was discouraged about raising the funds to go to Africa. She wrote this hymn as a hymn of surrender.

Have thine own way, Lord!
Have thine own way!
Thou art the potter,
I am the clay.
Mold me and make me
after thy will,
while I am waiting,
yielded and still.

Heal: Sit with this image. You are clay on God’s potter's wheel. Where is He working on you? Where is strengthening your weak areas? Where is he trimming away parts you no longer need? Where are your beautiful areas?

If you want an easy way to interpret your dreams that is based upon these foundations, always leads you back to relationship with the Holy Spirit, and offers you a practice that improves your prayer life, join our paid tier at the Inner Room, and get a free article you can use right away called: NINE AI PROMPTS FOR WORKING WITH YOUR DREAMS: A Christian and Jungian Framework for Using AI Without Losing the Holy Spirit. Subscribe at $12/month here:

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In the free article, we developed the foundations of dream interpretation. In this paid subscriber article, you will learn:

· Ways to use AI to strengthen your dream interpretation, and ways to DEFINITELY not use it (plus free AI prompts)

· How discernment must be practiced when interpreting dreams, and it’s not what you think

· Ways that the co-work that happens between you and the Holy Spirit becomes the very ground that promotes you into your calling with God

The dream you are having isn’t just telling you the future, although it may be. It’s also a highly specialized learning curriculum that the Holy Spirit is using to help you evolve into your calling and purposes.

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1. These prompts are specifically designed to BUILD upon the work we’ve done the last 9 weeks of the Dream interpretation arc (you can start here), while HONORING that God and the Holy Spirit are the interpreters. These prompts will give you more information to work through your dream, the feelings, the associations, as well as questions to ask the Holy Spirit, so that the AI works as a tool, rather than an interpreter.

2. Second, AI is a GREAT TOOL to learn how to discern. It can generate a list of symbol meanings for you, and you can practice discerning what is actually something that the Holy Spirit is using to speak to you, and what is actually not helpful. Remember, in week one of this arc, we talked about Hebrews 5:14, “But solid food is for the mature, whose senses are trained by practice to distinguish between good and evil.” AI is simply a tool; you bring your wisdom and the Holy Spirit to discern what God is saying to you.

So every prompt below ends the same way: with questions for you to carry into prayer. If an AI ever hands you a tidy conclusion anyway, that is your signal to close the window and go sit with the Lord instead.

Here are the 9 prompts, built on the foundations of dream interpretation I taught you in weeks 1-9 of this dream series.

If you haven’t joined us at the paid tier, please do so now, so that you can have a truly trustworthy guide to help you in dream interpretation.

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Recently, someone said to me, “Wow, I’ve never met anyone whose spiritual formation came through dreams,” and it occurred to me that that comment was worth an article. I want to be clear here that I’ve been walking with Jesus my whole life, I’m the daughter of missionaries, and I’m currently working toward my PhD in Theology, so my spiritual formation over four decades can’t be boiled down to dreams. However, I will say that dreams are the most direct path to maturation in my walk with Jesus that I can point to.

Part of that is because I’ve utilized dreams as part of my devotional practice, not just something I write down in a dream journal. There is a processs that the early church fathers recognized about dreams that I follow with a lot of trust, mainly because it has been substantially important for me to mature in my faith. Dreams also helped me overcome things that a lot of modern Christianity falls into:

· Falling away from God when confronted in the world, or the world’s systems

· Not developing my Christianity along with trends, but along with what my soul needed

· Recognizing deconstruction along orthodox and Biblically accurate ways, rather than deconstructing to my ego’s demands

· Clearly able to see when the demands of intellectualism outweigh the demands of what the Holy Spirit was pointing to

So, I want to share how dreams don’t just sit in my dream journal, or worse, just float away in the morning with my coffee. I want to share how they contribute to my bespoke way of maturing in Christ, and how you can use them to achieve the same result.

>>> AND BIG NEWS: For those of you who rarely dream, this week will be very helpful to you.

Where We Are in the Journey

We are in week 8 of a 10-week article series on dreams and their importance in our walk with God. In the first two weeks, we covered the Biblical grounds for listening to dreams, and then the early church grounds. In weeks 3-7, we covered various discernment practices used by the early church and examined some of Carl Jung’s categories of dreams found in the Biblical record as well.

If you are interested in this whole series, please subscribe for free at the button below. That will make sure you receive the articles in both your inbox and your Substack app.

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It Started with a Giraffe

I dreamt of a giraffe one night, and then I started seeing giraffes everywhere.

In household decor. Stories in the news. People telling me stories about their trip to the zoo and a particular giraffe they saw there, or a baby giraffe in the news. Every day for weeks, it was giraffes. Giraffes in the store windows. Giraffes on a magazine cover. Someone mentioned giraffes in a conversation that had nothing to do with anything I had brought up.

And sometimes, y’all, your girl doesn’t take the hint.

Finally, after what seemed like weeks of giraffes showing up everywhere I went, I finally stopped and prayed, “God, you’re obviously wanting to talk to me about the symbol of a giraffe. What does it mean?”

That night, as I lay down, I saw the neck of a giraffe extending up above the trees. From that vantage, I could see that the giraffe had an ability to see above the rest of the animals and therefore see danger coming from far away. I saw that the giraffe could eat the good leaves that most other creatures couldn’t reach. And then it settled into my heart.

The symbol of a giraffe, for me, meant Godly leadership.

God began speaking to me about what kind of leader He wanted me to be by using facts about giraffes. Such as:

· He wanted me to see danger coming a mile away so I could warn others.

· He wanted me to know that I would eat the best “leaves” as a leader (a sign that meant sitting under the best teaching) so that I could teach others about what I had learned.

· For weeks, God took me on a personal discovery of what it meant to be a Godly leader in these perilous times.

I was in heaven’s school for leaders. And it all started with a dream of a giraffe.

The 3-step Sequence for Dream Formation

1. In Ignatius’s examen, as well as the work of the Desert Fathers, “nepsis”, is the first step to engaging with your soul: pay attention. Notice that the giraffe was not just a dream, even though it started as a dream. It was noticing that giraffes were all over the place in my waking life as well. For those of you who don’t dream much, this is a great place to start. What symbol is showing up a lot in your life?

The idea of “nepsis” is that we are paying attention to our life and what is appearing to “come out of the blue.” I, for instance, have been seeing the number 111 up to six times a day for at least 6 months. Now, every time I see it, I am praying a prayer that accompanies what that number means for me.

If we are overcompensating with intelligence (mind), hyper religion or our body, often this process of “nepsis” is completely disregarded. It requires a stillness, a slowing down, and the ability to be okay with quiet moments.

2. Synchronicity. Synchronicity is a word that Carl Jung developed to talk about an “acausal connecting principle.” It is a principle he developed with Wolfgang Pauli, the father of quantum physics, to establish what connects “the heavens” and the material earth. In other words, these are signs and symbols that appear in our lives that have no material causation.

This “meaningful coincidence”, said Jung, was the soul attempting to provide speech into the material world so that we could understand what it was saying. These synchronisities are what Christians might call “God-moments” or “little miracles” in that they are material (in the world) representations of what the Spirit is saying to the soul. The signal the soul sends is amplified when we discover it in the material world. This could be a repeating verse, a repeating number, or a symbol (like the giraffe).

3. The third sequence for dream formation is active imagination. I won’t cover this one in detail here, but it is found in Ignatius (a 16th-century Jesuit) as “Spiritual Exercises”, and Jung utilized it to understand dream material. We also see this Biblically with Abraham and the stars (Genesis 15), the valley of the dry bones (Ezekiel 37), and Jeremiah and the almond branch (Jeremiah 1).

Active imagination is a process of entering the images from your dreams to fully understand what the symbol might mean. When I received my giraffe symbol, I went to Google, learned some facts about a giraffe, and asked the Lord to help me make an association between those facts and what He was trying to teach me. All the things He taught me were meant to further my understanding of leadership in the body of Christ and could be found in examples from the lives of leaders in the Bible.

Some people may ask, “Why wouldn’t God just have you read passages in the Bible about Godly leadership?” The answer is that God can expand and elaborate on Godly leadership that applies specifically to your life, using a symbol. This is why our relationship with the Holy Spirit is so crucial to this process.

This process also mirrors Lectio Divina, in which we meditate on something God is showing us in scripture, hymns, or art.

Habakkuk and Active Imagination

In Habakkuk 2:1-2, it says, “I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me, and what answer I am to give to this complaint. Then the Lord replied: Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.”

This passage strengthens the idea of Active Imagination. The prophet is not just passive about the signs, symbols, and speech he receives from God; rather, he positions himself to hear more of what God is saying. He is active with his journal, ready to run with instructions. This is a great model of the 3-step sequence for dream formation.

This is what I did with the giraffe. I finally stopped. I stationed myself before God. I looked to see what He would say about the symbol that had been following me for weeks. And in the liminal state of that receptive watching, the image developed into a formational and relational “language” between us. 1 Corinthians 2:9-10: “what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived, these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.”

God wants to form you as well through bespoke means, ways that will meet your spirit and soul that feel like “living waters” coming up from you. This is the abundant life that Jesus wanted for us from John 10:10, that we would receive His unique fingerprints for our own life and mature according to the unique soul that He has given us.

This week, in the paid tier called The Inner Room, I develop active imagination through its challenges and thrills, discovering where the Holy Spirit is really developing you as an individual. Join us here:

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Pause ~ Pray ~ Heal

Pause: Think of a dream image that stayed with you after waking -- something you wrote down, or something that lingered even if you did not write it down. Hold that image in your mind right now, notice what it does when you give it your full attention.

Pray: A prayer of Richard of St.Victor (12^th c.)

“O Lord, let my imagination be the mirror of the soul, catching the reflection of invisible truths through visible forms. May these earthly sights not hold me captive, but serve as a bridge to raise my mind to the contemplation of Your uncreated majesty.”

Heal: This week, consider the places where God has been speaking to you, but you did not know it. Review your journal and see how God was faithful to meet you and re-establish that God wants and is communicating with you.

If this sort of work is helping you develop or form into a mature Christian, consider joining our paid tier at $12/month for devotional insight related to each week’s articles. We also provide a discount for our courses to those who join us as paid subscribers. Join here:

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In the free article, we looked at 3 ways our dreams can become devotional content, building a spiritual formation practice unique to us, developed through the language and conversation we have with the Holy Spirit in our dreams.

In this article for paid subscribers, we will look at:

· Neurology: How the Desert Fathers used nepsis and hesychia to practice spiritual formation and how brain science confirms it

· How to discern your own soulish imagination from the illumination of the Holy Spirit

· Why Habakkuk shows us that we are in an ongoing conversation with Jesus, especially when we ask for understanding

We are going to get very specific about what the free article pointed at today so that you can also discover discipleship through your dreams.

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I was diagnosed with night terrors at age 3. I remember those extremely vivid nightmares and the absolute feeling of powerlessness. My mother did everything she could. And as a child, I was terrified of the night.

The enemy used this to build a deep fear in me about sleep and about what type of control he could have over me. For twenty years, I battled this demon. And then, early in my twenties, I woke up with yet another nightmare, but something had changed. My soul had finally found a way to battle. Before I was even awake, I screamed out, “In the name of Jesus, I break off this torture, I cast it out of my life forever, and I bind myself to Jesus’s perfect peace!” From that night forward, for the last 20 years, I have never had another nightmare…except one. More on that later in this article.

Where We Are on the Journey

We are now on week 7 of the dreams article arc, where we are building an understanding of how God speaks through dreams. If you are not a big dreamer, take heart because many of the stories in this series will help you remember your dreams or begin to build a better way of addressing them. We also cover the fact that dreams were regarded as God’s speech to us all through the Bible, and all the way into the 20^th century, when Enlightenment and Rationalistic worldviews stopped the church from considering dreams. You can learn more about that in weeks 1 and 2 of this dream article arc.

This week, I am going to cover nightmares, because we need to be grounded in what they are and how they tend to operate.

If you are new to us, welcome! In order to get each of these Sunday articles to your inbox, please subscribe for free here:

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The Dream I Rebuked

I firmly believe that the nightmares I had as a child were sent by Satan to torment me, build fear into my life, and make me distrust the adults in my life. Those twenty years growing up were torturous at night, and I will never underestimate the fear that comes with that level of torment for a child or an adult. And if that is you, I really, truly am praying for you to get deliverance through this article today.

However, as Christians, we need to understand that God always uses these things for good, and I want to share with you the good this season taught me, without excusing how very difficult it was.

· I learned to lean very deeply into Jesus during that scary time. When I woke up from a nightmare, I made sure to use that time to pray for every single person or circumstance in my life that needed prayer. I wanted to make the devil pay for sending the nightmare!

· I learned how to recognize fear as a vehicle of torment (1 John 4) as opposed to fear as a vehicle of building my awe in God. This taught me a deep discernment of my feelings.

· I learned how to battle for my own victory. My mother did everything she knew to do to help me, including every prayer she could think of. But sometimes God is building a resilience in you to battle from a place of His power, not the power of others.

When I had my breakthrough at the age of 22, I never once had a nightmare since (except for one time I’m about to tell you). I now know how real the spiritual realm is and that God truly does help us overcome the evil one.

However, I have had one nightmare since then, and this may be a bit of a trigger warning if you need to jump down past the dream. Just meet us at the next sub-heading if you need to skip this. About ten years ago, the only nightmare since my deliverance preceded the most challenging season of my life.

In the dream, I was in the shower, and a man came in and stabbed me in the heart repeatedly. Blood was mingling with the water, and I could feel myself dying. I woke up at 1 am and was not able to return to sleep that night. I rebuked every devil I could think of and prayed through my house and over every relationship I could think of. Around 8 a.m., I finally fell back asleep for a few hours.

I did not know it then, but I was about to enter the single most difficult season of my life.

The nightmare I assumed was definitely from Satan, but because I had been delivered, I was terrified that I had lost my deliverance. Turns out, the nightmare was actually a dream sent to warn me about the next season of my life.

As we know from John 10, Satan is a stealer, killer and destroyer. In the dream, he came as a thief into my house and stabbed me in the heart, which is symbolic of your love for God, your passion for the work God has called you to, and the intimacy you’ve built with Jesus.

The nightmare I thought was from the devil was actually a message from God letting me know that the season ahead could potentially kill my heart and my soul. It was a message to be prepared that the enemy was going to try to sift me like wheat. And God wanted me to be aware that my own passion, intimacy, and love for God were the very things the enemy was trying to steal from me.

That season lasted for five years. And it took everything out of me. But my heart, my zeal, and my fire were preserved. At the time, I had rebuked the message intended to save me, but God, in His great mercy, helped my heart remain His, and helped me find His passion and love in a greater way. By God’s mercy, the message in the nightmare got through to me anyway, but it wasn’t until that season was over that I realised I hadn’t lost my deliverance; I had actually rebuked a message from God.

Why Would God Allow a Nightmare?

There is often a theological assumption that does not serve the church. The assumption is that if you are afraid, it’s not from God. But clearly God sends scary things, which is why many angels who appear in the Bible often say, “Do not be afraid!” In Ezekiel 33, the prophet receives scary messages about the people of God and is told that if he doesn’t deliver the message, blood would be on his own hands. I want us to be careful not to rebuke scary things just because they are scary. Instead, we ask God to help us discern whether the dream is from Him or the enemy.

In Daniel 7:15, Daniel receives a dream that makes him sick for three days. “As for me, Daniel, my spirit within me was anxious, and the visions of my head alarmed me.” In Job 7:14, Job talks about getting nightmares from God: “Then you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions.” These verses let us know that God will absolutely send a nightmare to tell us of something that really needs our attention.

But there is another thing we must consider in the realm of nightmares, and that is, why would God allow us to receive a message from him as a nightmare?

>>>> HERE IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO GET

Even though God does send scary dreams, we need to understand His motives. In the nightmare I shared with you, God wanted me to realize that my soul dying was just as important to him as if my body was dying. We tend to overestimate the body, but God greatly esteems the soul. He loves your soul. He loves the Imago Dei within you, the image of God that He has built into your human life, and He loves and values it so much that He will risk sending a nightmare to wake you up and help you value the thing He values as well.

· He could use the nightmare to warn you about people you love, you pray for, or are intimate with

· He could use the nightmare to wake you up from a path that you are taking that is not from Him

· He could use the nightmare to save a people group, a nation, or a culture that you are sent to

· He could use the nightmare to warn you about Satan’s attempts on your soul, just like my nightmare was

The nightmare shakes us out of complacency so that we are truly hearing what He is saying to us. We may pray through the night, take action that we wouldn’t have taken before, or be alert about the motives of others; all because Jesus is shepherding our souls toward His perfect will for our lives.

How else could a nightmare show up in your life?

· Sometimes a nightmare could be compensatory, showing you, what emotions are aspects of your life you are ignoring at the expense of your soul. For example, they could be used to help you grieve the loss of a loved one and the nightmare helps you tap into emotions that your waking life keeps under wraps.

· Sometimes a nightmare, very similar to my example, could prepare you for a season that is ahead, in a prophetic sense. In those cases, God uses the nightmare to help you pray for yourself and what is coming, just like Jesus told Peter that he was praying for him with his 3x disowning of Jesus on the night he was betrayed.

· Sometimes a nightmare helps you process through trauma, and they can be used to heal you by giving your soul something to grieve and bring to God in prayer

· Once, I had a dream that was close to a nightmare, in that I was a girl who was trafficked for sex. I experienced in the dream everything a trafficked girl would experience; all of the emotions and fears were raw. When I woke up, the peace of God immediately wrapped me, and He said, “Now you know better how to pray for victims of sex trafficking.” I will never forget that dream.

But then again…not all nightmares are from God

This is a challenging dream category because it requires such discernment. As you can see from my own nightmare testimony, I did not know until 10 years later, when I was reflecting on this nightmare, that it was even sent from God. But you are reading this article, so I hope you will learn from my mistakes.

But what about the nightmare NOT sent by God?

I’ve been very detailed in the paid articles about how the early church used discernment in their dream practices and how discernment is a missing aspect of the church these days. Knowing if a dream is from the enemy requires real attention to discernment. Because a nightmare will result in making you shaken, scared, and sleepless, but those things are not indicators of whether it’s from God or not. What is an indication is that it will result in fruit in your soul: are you hopeless, further from God, oppressed by the devil? Most likely, it is Satan bringing the terror.

Also, rebuking the enemy is still a legitimate response when you wake up from a nightmare. Even if it is a nightmare sent from God, you do not want him to twist you into not receiving God’s message. He is a deceiver after all, and I think a faith-filled rebuke, where Jesus is called upon, can be extremely effective.

This week, in the paid Inner Room tier, I do a deep dive into discernment practices for the nightmare, as well as how to be delivered from your own nightmares sent by Satan to torture you. Subscribe here:

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Pause ~ Pray ~ Heal

Pause: Hold a questionable dream before God now. Ask in faith for Him to help you discern it.

Pray: A prayer of St. Augustine:

“Lord, govern what I cannot govern. Purify what arises within me while I sleep and let nothing that comes in darkness possess my heart.”

Heal: Journal through what this article brought up for you and join us in the paid tier of the Inner Room for more discernment practices that you can put to work today.

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In the free article, we discussed the nightmare and how we can really attune our discernment practices utilising these types of dreams. We also talked about ways to be delivered from the enemy's tormenting nightmares.

Here in the Inner Room paid tier, we are going to go through the entire discernment framework and additional ways to be delivered from the torment of nightmares from the enemy. In today’s article, we will:

· Dive deeper into 4 types of nightmares and what is being communicated in each, and how to discern each of them (with accompanying prayers, verses and journal prompts)

· Develop a 5-minute discernment practice that helps you at 2 am when you’ve had a nightmare

· How to utilize greater discernment about the nightmare to help your children or yourself find healing from any of the enemy’s tormenting dreams.

Since both the Bible and the early church fathers recognized that nightmares are occasionally from God they are some of the most easily dismissed dreams of warning. I really want us to be careful in this particular category of dream because I realize how very troubling the nightmare is (as I attested in my testimony in the free article), but I also want to give you relief of knowing that God DOES deliver you from nightmares that are from the enemy. Here are some of the keys.

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The same sign may reappear all the time, and it could even be in your waking hours, maybe even 11:11 repeating on your clock or seeing the same name on a street sign that you’ve seen two other places that week. Often, we experience recurring signs in our waking or dreaming hours, and they are not just there to freak you out, nor are they “angel numbers.” They are patterns of communication that God is trying to establish with you. And He is patiently waiting to see if you will say yes to his conversation.

Where We Are in the Journey

We are in week six of the Dreams article arc, and in the first two weeks, we took deliberate, careful steps through the Bible and Church history to show that dreams have always been part of orthodox Christian life. It was only during the era of Rationalism and the Enlightenment that we let the world's culture talk us out of the pattern of communication that God established in the Bible and in the first 1800 years of church history.

Over the last 4 weeks, we have carefully begun constructing pathways of understanding in the realm of dreams, signs, and symbols. We looked at how the church has interpreted them, discerned them, and developed maturity in the way Jesus speaks to our souls.

This week, we will look at repeating patterns:

· Not just in your dream life, but also in your waking life

· We will look at how Jesus is patient in His love and attempts to communicate with us

· Then, we will see how receiving a repeating sign or pattern is actually the soul telling us that it needs our help

If you are interested in receiving each article we create in this article arc (we are now on week 6 of 10, so you can go back to read them all) subscribe for free at the button below.

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The Dream That Leaves Real Anxiety

I am in school. Sitting at a desk, taking an exam I never studied for. Worse, this is an exam I know nothing about. I struggle through the answers: equations that look like a different language than I even understand. I slump up to the front of class and turn it in, knowing I probably got less than an F. I wake up in a sweat, with real anxiety pumping through my body. It takes me real effort to get back to sleep, even a kind of laugh to myself that I’m dreaming about being in school again.

Listen, you probably know exactly what I mean when you hear this dream. You may not relate to the school part, but maybe you relate to dreams that give you real-life anxiety. What’s with that? Today, we tackle these repeating patterns and what they mean.

It is difficult when dreams give us a real somatic (bodily) response: we wake up in anxiety and remember we haven’t been in school for 25 years, or we sit straight up in bed because we think we are late to an appointment we don’t even have. These kinds of dreams are perhaps frustrating and easy to dismiss.

But we really shouldn’t because these dreams are an alarm clock from our soul.

Often these dreams are our soul telling us that we are neglecting our soul life in some way.

· A repeating school dream with an exam could mean that you are compensating for your intellect, but the exam of the soul (your feelings, your calling from God, your unique purposes and strengths) is being neglected

· A repeating number that you see in your waking life could refer to a Bible verse that you need to seek out and apply

· A Dream of being late to an appointment you don’t even have could mean that your soul is asking you to consider aspects of your soul that need to be considered, rather than forgotten

The reason these dreams produce a real bodily response (anxiety, frustration, fear) is that your soul is asking you to take those bodily feelings seriously, and not to neglect what your soul needs, just like you wouldn’t neglect what your body needs.

The Research: School Dreams Are the Most Common Dream

The exam dream is one of the most frequent recurring dreams in human experience. Research across cultures consistently finds that a remarkably high percentage of adults report dreaming about being back in school, unprepared for an exam, and unable to pass or remember the lines for a school performance. Often, the research shows this is happening for people who haven’t been in school for decades. And it happens for those who love school and those who hate school. So the actual dream isn’t speaking to an old-school experience; it’s speaking about what your soul needs to develop in order to “pass the test” and move on to the next stage of your psyche’s maturity.

Can you imagine how your soul feels that it is not being considered in your maturation? So it sends a dream that signals it is time to mature into the next phase of your life. Jesus is so patient with us as we develop, but sometimes we could all use a wake-up call!

These dreams recur so often across so many people’s lives that we need to understand they are pivotal moments of transformation for us.

Why the Nervous Breakdown Could Be Avoided

Carl Jung observed that the recurring dream is the psyche’s way of creating bodily sensations so that it is no longer ignored. He routinely evaluated people who:

· Were on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and their dreams were telling them why

· Were about to have an affair, or make a drastic life decision, because they did not know how to understand the dream life and the soul

· Had a personality that would doggedly persist in a direction that their dreams were trying to wake them up from

Jung often did not start by asking people, “What do you want to work on today?” But he would instead say, “Tell me your most recent dream.” The dream was his way of understanding the psyche and its needs, even before most people could understand their own psyche at all. The dream isn’t recurring to be stubborn or to start your day in panic. The dream is recurring because your real life could be severely affected if your soul is ignored.

We have no problem going to the hospital for a severe knife wound from a cooking accident. The hospital is the place where we fix our bodies. But the dream is the only way the soul knows how to fix itself: the hospital of your soul is the dream you keep having.

In Daniel 2, we see this play out in real time. We all know the story of King Nebuchadnezzar and how he was turned into a beast for 7 years. The dream he had troubled him because he was experiencing psychic inflation, a feeling of untouchable hubris and the dream was warning him that he needed to repent or his actual body would reflect the psychic imbalance. With somebody with extreme feelings of grandiosity, it may be easy to say, “Oh yes, his soul was deeply troubled.” But we often don’t pay attention to the dreams that warn us of our own burnout, compensation through intelligence or our physical bodies, or dreams that remind us that our soul needs rest, creativity, childlike play, or invigoration.

Praise God that He created us with the capacity to repent after our dreams tell us what our souls actually need. That repentance isn’t a turning from sin; it is repentance for not acknowledging that our souls need to love the Lord our God, too, not just our intelligence! Jesus is the patient shepherd leading us to streams of Living Water, so our souls can be refreshed.

If you are ready for a transformative experience that guides your soul using the dreams in the night, out paid Inner Room tier includes devotionals, live teachings and chat features that empower you into transformation. Subscribe at $12/month here.

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The Recurring Dream: Next Steps

Psalm 77:6 in the Message Bible says this, “I go over the days one by one, I ponder the years gone by. I strum my lute all through the night, wondering how to get my life together.” The night is really the place where we ask the tough questions, wonder about our lives, and pray our most desperate prayers. Maybe, all along, Jesus was trying to shepherd your soul into His rest by sending you a dream.

Pause: This is a time to turn inward and ask if your somatic dreams are there to help you find your way to the rest that God promises in Psalms 23. Sit with the feeling of your dream for a second and ask the Lord to guide your hand toward understanding what your soul may need.

Pray: From St. Columba (a Celtic saint, 521–597).

Be thou a bright flame before me,
Be thou a guiding star above me,
Be thou a smooth path below me,
Be thou a kindly shepherd behind me,
Today, tonight, and forever.

Heal: Write down the emotion you feel as you wake this week. Ask God to guide you in understanding His shepherding toward your soul.

Every week in the paid Inner Room tier, I guide our readers through transformative experiences. This week, I am providing a 7-day devotional practice for hearing your soul through dreams. Subscribe below.

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In this week’s free article, we identified a recurring dream as a message to your soul and a way to explore the subtle hints Jesus shows us about where He actually stands in the drama of your life. Here, in the Inner Room, is where we will be getting practical about developing formation practices around the dream Jesus sends us. This week, I am going to hand you a structured week-long practice that invites deeper reflections on messages that you are struggling to understand or hear.

We will cover in this article:

· Why our emotions are integral to this practice of recovering our soul from hyper-intellectualism

· How to find the patterns in your waking life that your dream is hinting at

· And we will do this work in a 7-day devotional practice you can start today!

First, let’s begin with how dreams can become an integral part of your devotional practice with Jesus. Over the last 6 weeks in the paid subscriber articles, we have been developing a solid foundation for dream interpretation. Today, we begin to put all those pieces together again, so don’t be afraid to go back and read the paid articles that came before this.

Note: We will cover this in more detail in the upcoming monthly live session.

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A frightening figure in your dream is not what you think it is. Neither is the stranger you cannot place, nor the beautiful, radiant stranger. The friend from elementary school, or the ex-boyfriend from twenty years ago…still not what you think. Today, we discover that the cast of characters in your dreams can have an extensive catalog of meanings, or it could be reflecting a message you need to hear. A message that is tailored to the prayers you are praying, the needs you have in life, and the dreams that you are pursuing. The figures also convey a message about who God made you to be when the world tries to make you into something different.

Where We Are in the Journey

We are on the 5^th week of the Dreams article arc. If this is the first time you’ve read these articles, I invite you to read weeks one and two, where I discuss both the Biblical and historical early church’s belief in the significance of listening to your dreams. We also established that dreams are a primary mode of communication from God in Scripture, not something to be dismissed.

Over the last 3 weeks, we’ve looked at how dreams help develop and mature your soul for the work you are called to do, showing you where you may have ignored certain feelings or compensated in certain areas of your life. We also distinguish between symbol and sign.

This week, we consider the people in your dream:

· Is the person in your dream the literal person, or do they represent someone else?

· What can they reveal about your own inner life?

· How your dreams can teach you to pray effectively.

Let’s jump in.

My Returning Ex-Boyfriend

For nearly two decades after a painful breakup, and even into some of the first years of my happy marriage, my ex-boyfriend kept showing up in my dreams. At first, I did not know why he was showing up, so I would just use that opportunity to pray for him. I would wake up, register that he had appeared, say a prayer that he was doing well, and move on with my day. That felt like the responsible way to navigate these dreams. It also, I now see, missed everything the dream was actually trying to say.

As I began studying dreams from the Christian and Jungian traditions, I reconsidered why he was showing up in my dreams in the first place. In some dreams (not all), a person shows up to remind you of the season of your life in which they were a large part. When I was dating this boyfriend at age 17, I became clingy and co-dependent. It contributed greatly to why we broke up. In the years after that relationship, I worked hard at becoming someone who was secure with Christ within her. But when I was dreaming of my ex, it had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the original wound within me: the fact that I felt I needed to earn love. I had done everything I could think of to heal from that wound of rejection, but these dreams were giving me clues that my original wound needed to be healed from a deeper place, beyond my intellect and doing what I knew to do in the natural realm; God wanted to heal me at a soul level.

With that awareness, I began to pray differently.

I began asking God to do the work only He could do at the level of the soul. I began poring over every dream I had had with my ex-boyfriend, and I saw how this realization unlocked each dream’s meaning. There were clues in each of these dreams that showed me how to pray for my soul's healing.

· In one dream, the loss of this boyfriend triggered great grief. I realized that I needed to ask God to help me express my emotions about rejection, not just from that relationship but from many significant relationships in my life.

· In another dream, the time I had spent with my boyfriend became an onramp into an expedited season of growth for God and me. I realized that God wanted me to heal from rejection so that it wouldn’t be a stumbling block between him and me.

As you can see, these dreams didn’t have anything to do with my boyfriend! My prayer life intensified, aligning with Jesus’ hopes and desires for my life. A life free from rejection!

For several years after this, the dreams kept coming, but I now knew what they meant: my ex-boyfriend represented a feeling of rejection that I needed to heal! So each time I dreamt of this person, I was now able to take another layer of rejection off my life! Bit by bit, God was healing me of a huge soul problem that could have run my soul’s direction if I had not understood these dreams!

I also:

· Used the dreams as a springboard of questions that I would journal with God about: Where was I performing instead of receiving? Where was I working for what had already been given?

· Recognized where rejection was working in other areas of my life: a boss, a parent, a sibling, or a new friend.

But here is the biggest transformation I want you to see: the dreams freed me from feelings of rejection and allowed me to feel love towards others instead. This was genuine fruit being produced in my life, fruit of the Spirit (love) that was bursting up out of me without me having to manufacture it.

Once the Lord did deep work within me, the dreams about my ex-boyfriend ended because I had received the message He was trying to give me.

People Rarely Represent Themselves

This is a key point, and most people who dream miss it: the people in your dreams rarely represent themselves. Those people can represent:

· A feeling or season of your life

· A soul wound

· Their name can mean something, or reveal a message to you

· Their archetype is being confronted in you (this is a topic we will cover in later articles)

· Only about 1% of the time do they actually represent themselves

Carl Jung utilized the term ‘projection’ to convey that the figures in our dreams carry qualities, fears, desires, or unresolved tensions in our own lives. The dream figure becomes a container of what the inner life needs to be resolved. The beauty of dreams is that they name the things that are so difficult for us to name (or face) ourselves.

In Genesis 32, Jacob wrestles with God until he gets God’s blessing. Jacob names the place Peniel: “I have seen God face to face and my life has been delivered.” God came to him in the night, and He was more than he appeared.

And what was Jacob’s posture? To not let go until he received the blessing. That is what we do every night when we don’t listen to our dreams. Leaning into what they mean helps you lean into the blessing.

How to Begin Working with the People in Your Dreams

When someone appears in your dream, ask:

· What three words would I use to describe this person?

· What role or archetype do they play?

· What season of my life were they in?

· Does their name mean something?

And then bring it to the Holy Spirit. Ask Him to show you what they represent, don’t “lean on your own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5). Be prepared to receive an extravagant gift of love from God for the area you are least expecting to hear about.

1 John 4:18 says that perfect love casts out fear, and that fear and torment are working against love in your life. The figure who keeps returning in your dreams, whether you fear, or dread, or question, may be something within you that God wants to remove: some soul wound, or feeling of inadequacy. The Perfect love of God sends a dream so that you are not tormented in your soul. Let God heal the soul wound that the people in your dreams can represent.

Pause ~ Pray ~ Heal

Pause: Think of a figure who has appeared repeatedly in your dreams. What three words would you use to describe them. Write them down.

Pray: A prayer drawn from the story of Jacob wrestling.

Lord, I will wrestle with the people you sent to me in the night. I am willing to be changed by what it may mean. I am willing to limp away even as the Blessing appears in knowing you more. But I will not let go without a blessing. Show me what my dreams are holding for me. And help me to hold my life before You.

Heal: This week, when a person appears in your dream, try these practices. And let the Holy Spirit bring you into all truth.