The church made a quiet decision that God never agreed to. No council, no creed, no formal declaration -- just a slow drift away from something Scripture takes entirely for granted: that God speaks to sleeping people, and the ones who pay attention change the course of nations. You were probably taught -- explicitly or implicitly -- that dreams are not a reliable category of spiritual experience. Too subjective. Too easily manipulated. Too vulnerable to self-deception. Better to stay in Scripture, stay in prayer, stay in the verifiable. And yet the Scripture you were told to stay in is saturated with dreams. Genesis to Revelation, God speaks in the night, and the narrative turns on whether anyone is paying attention. This series does not ask you to abandon discernment. It asks you to apply your discernment to something the Bible never stopped taking seriously -- and the church quietly decided to leave behind.
Where We Are in the Journey
We are beginning something new. Across the next ten weeks, through Scripture and Jungian depth psychology, we are going to recover a practice the serious Christian was never supposed to lose: the practice of receiving, holding, and working with the dreams God gives in the night. This is not a departure from orthodox Christianity. It is a return to it. We are building, as we always do in this work, a theology of psychological wholeness serious enough for every channel through which God speaks -- including the ones that happen while you are asleep.
The Bible You Know Is Full of Dreams
Begin with the obvious, because the obvious is startling when you look at it directly. The narrative of Scripture does not move without dreams.
In Genesis 28, Jacob is sleeping with his head on a stone at Bethel when God appears to him in a dream. A ladder reaches from earth to heaven. Angels ascend and descend. And God speaks: I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring (Genesis 28:13). This is not a minor moment. It is a covenant moment. The Abrahamic promise is renewed to Jacob not in the temple, not through a prophet, not in a moment of waking prayer. In a dream. At a rest stop on a journey. While he was asleep.
In Genesis 37, the entire arc of Joseph’s story -- the hinge on which the salvation of Israel will later turn -- begins with two dreams. Joseph dreams that his brothers’ sheaves bow down to his. He dreams that the sun, moon, and eleven stars bow down to him. His brothers hate him for it. His father rebukes him and then, quietly, keeps the saying in mind (Genesis 37:11). The story that leads to Israel’s survival in Egypt, to Moses, to the Exodus, to everything that follows -- it begins in a dream that a seventeen-year-old boy refuses to keep to himself.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph the carpenter -- the man entrusted with the physical protection of the Son of God -- receives his most critical instructions in dreams. Do not fear to take Mary as your wife (Matthew 1:20). Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt (Matthew 2:13). Rise, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel (Matthew 2:20). Three dreams. Three obediences. And because of those three obediences, Jesus survives his infancy. The Magi receive their own warning in a dream and go home by another way (Matthew 2:12), foiling Herod’s search. The early chapters of the Gospel of Matthew are held together by dream obedience.
And then Joel 2:28, quoted by Peter on the day of Pentecost as the fulfillment of the Spirit’s outpouring: And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. The dream is not the exception to the Spirit’s work. According to Peter, it is evidence of it.
The Quiet Decision
So how did the church arrive at a place where dreams are filed under ‘pizza dreams’ -- the slightly dismissive shorthand for the position that dreams are just neurological noise, the brain processing the day’s input, nothing a serious Christian needs to bother with?
The answer is not straightforward, but the short version is this: the Enlightenment changed what counted as real knowledge. Rational, verifiable, empirical -- these became the categories of serious thought, and anything that could not be measured or tested was gradually moved to the margins. The church, particularly in its Protestant forms, absorbed this epistemology more thoroughly than it realized. The inner life became suspect. The subjective was unreliable. The mystical and the contemplative were allowed to persist as minority traditions but were rarely given structural support. And the dream, which is irreducibly subjective and interior, was one of the casualties.
This is not a biblical position. It is a cultural one. And it is worth naming that clearly, because many sincere Christians have been carrying a low-grade guilt about their dreams for years. They wake from something significant and feel a pull toward it, and then remember that serious Christians are not supposed to be too interested in that sort of thing. So they let it go. And God, who was speaking, goes unanswered.
You Already Knew
I want to speak directly to something now, because I think it is true of more of you than will admit it.
I always knew that God spoke in dreams. Not because someone taught me carefully and I came to the position through study -- but because the knowing was simply there, underneath the polite skepticism my Christian tradition occasionally performed. When the Charismatic tradition and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal gave me language and framework for understanding dreams and their interpretation, I did not feel like I was learning something new. I felt like I was being given vocabulary for something I had already recognized.
Maybe you are like me. Maybe you quietly nodded along when your tradition laughed at the idea of God speaking in dreams -- too charismatic, too subjective, too easily manipulated -- while something in you knew that the same Bible you were taught to trust used dreams to save Jesus in his early years, through a father who obeyed in the night what God spoke while he slept. You knew that kings were brought to their knees seeking interpretation from those who walked with God. You knew that the story of Israel does not reach the Exodus without Joseph’s dreams. You kept that knowing quietly and perhaps felt a little embarrassed by it.
This arc is the permission you have been waiting for. Not permission from me. Permission from the text that was always there.
What Jung Saw
Carl Jung spent decades working with the dreams of his patients, and one of his most striking observations was historical rather than clinical: modern Western culture -- and in particular the Protestant tradition -- is one of the only civilizations in recorded history to treat the dream as meaningless. The Egyptians built temples for dream incubation. The Hebrews had a rich theology of the dream as divine speech. The Greeks sent their sick to the temple of Asclepius to sleep and receive healing through dreams. The early church Fathers wrote extensively about dreams as a category of divine communication. Augustine, Tertullian, Jerome -- the fathers of the tradition took dreams seriously, argued about how to discern them, and documented their own.
Jung saw the modern dismissal not as enlightened progress but as a profound impoverishment. The inner life had been handed over to rational consciousness, and the channels through which deeper material had historically surfaced -- the dream, the vision, the symbol -- had been closed off or pathologized. He spent his career attempting to reopen what had been sealed. For the Christian, the reopening is not Jungian at all. It is a return to the biblical normal.
This week inside The Inner Room, we go deeper into the history of dream interpretation in the Christian tradition specifically -- the Desert Fathers who had sophisticated frameworks for discerning dreams, the early church debates about which dreams were from God and which were not, and a first practice for beginning to receive your own dreams with attention and discernment. We also begin together with a simple dream journal practice you can start tonight.
Pause * Pray * Heal
Pause: Think back over the last month. Has there been a dream you dismissed, let go of, or felt vaguely pulled toward and then ignored? You do not need to interpret it now. Just let it come back, if it will. Hold it gently.
Pray: A prayer drawn from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, who prayed this before sleep:
Lord, as I give my body to sleep, keep watch over what my body cannot guard. Speak in the night if you will. And give me ears that are willing to hear what the waking hours too often close against you.
Heal: Before you sleep tonight, place a notebook and pen beside your bed. Write one sentence at the top of the first page: I am paying attention now. That is all. The practice begins with the posture.
The Christian Jung is a reader-supported publication. If this arc is opening something in you that needed to be opened, the most faithful thing you can do is share it with one person who has been quietly wondering the same things. The next nine weeks are going to go somewhere most Christian content never goes. I am glad you are here.
This was a beautifully written opening to the series. The line about the church making 'a quiet decision that God never agreed to' is going to sit with me for a while. You're right that dreams get dismissed too quickly in a lot of modern discipleship, and your walk through Genesis, Matthew, and Joel 2:28 is a fair and honest reading. Joseph's dreams shaping the salvation of Israel, the Magi being warned in a dream, Pentecost itself being tied to dreams and visions. That's not a stretch, that's just Scripture. I'm grateful for the reminder that 'staying in the verifiable' shouldn't mean shrinking what God is allowed to use to speak.
The one place I'd love to think out loud with you is the move toward Jung himself. I don't doubt Jung was onto something true about the modern West losing touch with symbol and the inner life. We're losing lots of things in the West. But Jung's own framework comes with its own theology of the self, where meaning is generated from within the psyche rather than received from a personal God who speaks to us from outside ourselves. That's a meaningfully different starting point than Joseph or Daniel had. It doesn't mean nothing Jung observed is useful — but I think it's worth being explicit with readers about where the borrowed framework and the biblical one might quietly pull in different directions, especially since this series is inviting people to actually practice something, not just think about it.
None of that is a knock on the project. Recovering dreams as a legitimate category of spiritual experience is worth doing, and you're clearly doing the work of taking both Scripture and the history of ideas seriously. I'll be reading along. Just hoping the series holds the biblical text as the plumb line the Jungian material gets measured against, rather than the other way around.
Aaron I really appreciate this meaningful comment on the article. As you follow me, you'll see that I make Jung bow to Scripture, never the other way around. I'm a theologian first, but I've found Jung to be extremely helpful in addressing the soul. I'm particularly interested in how Jung is able to get at the patterns beneath our sin and unravel them. I see so many Christians struggle with sin because they're trying to approach it from behavior management rather than from the patterns of the soul that Jung described.
Regarding Jung's "theology of the self" he would disagree, however I understand why you might say that. Jung explicitly delineated his work as psychology, and not theology, ad nauseum. Yes, plenty of people have developed a "theology" around his ideas but he would not defend them as theology. However, your point as to where "messages" are coming from (the Self or God Himself) does deserve a careful reflection and article on its own. I'll start brainstorming it today 😃. Thank you again for this beautiful and helpful comment.