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.
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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:
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 (12th 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.
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