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.
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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.
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: